


But He Lived Well Enough

by acareeroutofrobbingbanks



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, IT Chapter Two Spoilers, M/M, post It Chapter Two, technically cannon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2020-10-11 13:10:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 44,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20546699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acareeroutofrobbingbanks/pseuds/acareeroutofrobbingbanks
Summary: Losers fight IT. Losers defeat IT, but one Loser dies in the process. Everyone else escapes, and they try to grieve and move on with their lives. There's just one problem.Eddie isn't dead.OREddie Kaspbrak is a bamf who won't go down that easy





	1. Nothing Lasts Forever (Except Love, Desire, and Very Stubborn Gay Men)

There was a rock on his chest and fire in his stomach. In his _spine_. His first coherent thought was “Aspirin won’t do shit for this,” and his second was “_Richie_.”

Slowly, so slowly because every millimeter was like a shriek of agony grating against his muscles, his skin, his whole being rather than his ears, he lifted his left hand. There was a dull clatter as he did so, the deep thrum of wet rocks hitting stone, a sound so bass he seemed to feel it clunk through his bones instead of hearing it. There was grit against his hand, he realized faintly, tiny bits of damp gravel pressed into his skin. 

That was a good detail to notice, he thought. He needed to take stock of himself, to feel something beyond the pain that was omnipresent and overwhelming. Was he hurt? Oh, God, yes, he was hurt. He didn’t think he had ever hurt so much in his life. But he couldn’t focus on the pain, not yet. He suspected he could lay there till kingdom fucking come thinking about how much he hurt and nothing else. But nothing would change if he did so. No one would come. He was certain that no one was coming. Through all the mind-numbing pain he could hear a very little, and most of what he heard was a natural silence. Wherever he was, he was alone. Or, at least, there were no other people with him.

But, oh, that was a panicky thought, and one that would have to wait. Besides, the pain signified (had to signify) that he was alive. Death couldn’t hurt this much, could it? There were things to be grateful for, like he could apparently move at least one arm, and he was alive, and he was breathing easier than he ever had in his life.

He supposed his asthma was gone forever. It had better fucking be, he thought. He’d burned his fucking inhaler. The thought almost drew a laugh from him, but even the change in his breathing sent the fire in his gut ripping up into his ribcage, so he stifled the thought.

So. First thing first: his arm. He twisted his left arm from side to side, and felt only minor twinges of pain in it. The movement tore at his chest where they met, but the arm itself seemed fine. He clenched that hand into a fist, then unclenched it. Hand was fine too, that was a relief. He knew most of the news wouldn’t be so good, so he would take the little victory. 

Next was his right arm, and he had suspected that it would be every bit as painless as the left, but he quickly realized that he was dismally mistaken. He tried to lift his arm and screamed aloud. It was a thin, taut whisper of a scream, one that whistled out from the ache in his chest and echoed weakly against the rock walls of the cavern he was in. 

_Cavern._

_Cistern._

His breath came back as a wheeze.

No, no, he could panic in nice, white, starchy hospital sheets, but not now. Not yet. He reached over his broken body with his left arm, jostling as little as possible, though it was still aching, ripping, searing. There was a rock on top of his right arm, bigger than the tiny chunks of rubble that had slid off his left arm, from the feel of it. He didn’t open his eyes, not yet. He would do that last, because if it was as bad as he feared it was, he wouldn’t risk making himself too hopeless to move. So, he couldn’t see how big it was, but he felt all around it with his left hand, mercifully unhurt. It was jagged, probably cutting into his skin too, but not too much bigger than the gaudy, geode bookends that sat on the shelf at his GP’s office. Heavy, but…

This was going to hurt, he told himself. He wished for something to bite down on for half a second but putting it off would make it hurt more. He gritted his teeth and shoved with his good hand as hard as he could.

He didn’t scream this time. He was prepared, and besides, for as much as it hurt his right arm, the exertion seemed to hurt his chest more, which was welcome distraction. The big rock clattered away, and his right arm was free to throb again. He tried once more to lift it, and found that he could, which was more than he had dared hope for. It seemed almost fine above the elbow, he thought, probing it with the fingers on his left hand. His forearm was - well, if it had been crushed in multiple places, he didn’t want to think about what it was like, but half an arm had to be better than none at all, right?

Time to bite back laughter again at that absurd thought, and he steeled himself to check for any function in his hand. He wiggled his thumb experimentally. It only half-worked, moving in a strange, jagged twitch that wasn’t going to be functional at all. But as he tested his other fingers, he realized that his hand was still clasped around something. A piece of fabric lay under his hand, clenched in his clawed and useless fingers. 

“_Richie_,” his mind said again, more insistent this time. It sounded like a whine even in his own head, but this time with mean. Richie’s jacket, right? Why had he-?

_Stop the bleeding, he’s hurt he’s-_

He swallowed convulsively. Another thing that worked. He moved his right leg, and there was a scattering of rocks. Again, the movement tore at his gut, his chest, but his leg seemed functional. He bent it up at the knee, knocking aside a few more, smaller rocks. He rotated his ankle next, but there he found a sharp jab in his muscles, a protest not as debilitating as his torso, but still clearly injured. He flexed, felt tears smart behind his eyelids, he _could_ do it. Sprained? He felt in his pocket with his good hand and produced a bottle of aspirin. It was difficult to pop a child safety cap one-handed, but he was an expert at such delicate maneuvers. He half-dumped the bottle’s contents into his hand, only for the sludge to run through his fingers. The bottle wasn’t water-tight, apparently, and all that remained was a gray water and painkiller slushie.

He tossed the bottle aside and did not cry. Anyway, he told himself, a blood thinner would be bad for his stomach - bad for the gaping hole in it, at any rate. The pain he would just have to deal with. 

Checking his other leg was a similar but less eventful process. It was stiff and sore, but still functional. With nothing else to delay him, he lifted his head a little (neck was stiff and sore and fine) then, putting as much weight as possible on his left arm, pushed himself into a sitting position.

Pain tore through him in thick waves, bursting behind his eyes and pulsating through his stomach his chest his back. There were no functioning muscles to help his stomach bend, but there were apparently plenty of nerves left to feel him try. His miraculously functioning legs helped him scoot until his back was up against a big, strong rock. Once he was sat up, he made a final assessment.

One broken arm. One punctured midsection. Several broken ribs, from the feel of it. A sprained ankle. A stabbed cheek that had, from the sticky wetness on his face, apparently started bleeding again. Aches and bruises and scrapes everywhere. Maybe a concussion, probably internal bleeding. It was a list that would make a normal, sane person balk, and he had never been particularly pragmatic about his own health. But it could have been worse.

Knowing the internal damage, he had to see how bad it was on the outside. Had to know his insurmountable odds. The longer he took to open his eyes now, he realized, the worse it was going to get.

_Braver than you think_.

Slowly, Eddie Kaspbrak opened his eyes at the exact same time as Richie Tozier opened his on the either side of the city, and a world away.

***

Richie had opened his eyes underwater, and he wasn’t all that impressed with the sight. The water in the quarry was dirtier than he remembered it. Murky. It wasn’t

_graywater, dude-_

sewer water, but it wasn’t the pristine Pacific Ocean that ran smooth and pure as emeralds on the beach that was essentially his backyard. Back home. In California. In the real world. In his real life, or, the life he was trying to convince himself was realer than this one. But he couldn’t really make himself believe it. He felt hollow, a Halloween pumpkin with his guts scooped out. It was as though the times with the Losers, the times he’d spent with It, were the only real parts of his life at all. There was a prologue of childhood, a sprinkle of real life, an interlude of 27 fucking years, and now with It defeated and the Losers all about to part ways again, the unreality of an epilogue was fast zooming towards him. Then he would fade back into California, the comedian role of his life, and cease to exist entirely. A sudden, childish urge rose up in him - just to stay under the water, like he was hiding from his parents who might take him home. _Can’t make me leave if you can’t find me_. Stupid. Did he want to stay in _Derry _of all places?

Well, did leaving mean forgetting? He still wouldn’t be sure of his answer if it did. On the one hand, he never wanted to forget all of this again. The Losers, the clubhouse, he wanted to keep that. But on the other hand, he didn’t want to remember-

_Richie!_

_Eddie!_

_He’s hurt, someone-_

_I have to tell you something-_

_He’s dead-_

Yeah, Richie could use some good, old-fashioned, moving away from Derry brain bleach for the past day or so. Maybe remembering would be healthier, grieving would be good for him in the long run, but this hurt. Richie wanted to be numb, and to forget ever loving Eddie Kaspbrak in the first place. 

When his lungs started burning, he came up for air. Ben and Bev were still entwined with one another. Mike still looked distant, happy and dazed to be free of this godforsaken city at last. But Bill was looking at him, a sorrowful expression on his face. He couldn’t tell if it was guilt, pity, or grief of his own, but whatever it was, Richie decided that he didn’t like it.

_“They love you, though_,” he thought to himself. “_All the years and all the dumb jokes and they still love you_.” 

And they all loved Eddie too. This wasn’t Richie’s grief alone, which should be comforting. They all loved Eddie. The only difference was that none of them loved him the way that Richie did.

Richie got out of the quarry eventually. They others were still playing - it was a weird word to ascribe to adults, but that was the only word to describe it. They were splashing and dunking each other, laughing with unembarrassed, high pitched laughs. Little kid laughs. It was probably good and therapeutic, and while it was good, better than all the darkness and fear of the past few days, but even with the shared grief it was still too fucking happy. 

Oh, he didn’t want to leave, but he couldn’t stay. Not for another second. 

Richie climbed out of the water before he actually said anything. They didn’t have towels or dry clothes or anything useful, so he had to wait there on the ledge for at least a minute. He didn’t need to be dry to leave town, but his car had been through a lot over the past few days. He loved his car in exactly the pathetic, middle-aged man way that all men his age loved their cars, and he felt guilty for even driving it into Derry, much less all the blood and sewer water that had already probably gotten all over it. He could wait a few minutes so that he didn’t completely soak the leather.

“Richie?” 

Oh, and he hated that childhood nickname, he decided. It had been such a good memory when he first heard Mike say it, but now it felt like an icepick in the back of his head. 

He turned around. The image of Bill was fractured in his peripheral vision, looking sorrowful and concerned in a paternal way, as usual. 

“Are you going?” he asked.

“In a bit, yeah,” Richie said. “Places to do, people to see, time to blow this popsicle stand.” He smiled at Bill. It was an uncomfortable, forced smile, and he could see from Bill’s face that it was obvious.

“Will you keep in touch?” Bill asked. No stutter.

“My people will call your people,” Richie said in his best deep-announcer voice. Bill gave him a fond smile.

“Same old Trashmouth,” Bill said. He clapped Richie on the shoulder, a real hetero-man-bro move, and Richie felt the muscles in his cheeks getting tired from too much fake smiling. 

“You headed straight out of town?” Beverly asked, also swimming up to the ledge. Richie could feel the grin slipping back into a grimace. This was turning into a production and he just wanted to go home, just wanted to forgive, just wanted his heart to stop thumping out _Eddie, Eddie, Eddie _over and over again.

“Don’t worry, shweetheart,” Richie said. “You all know how to find me. I’ll add you all to my Christmas mailer.”

He ran up the steep slope before someone could say something else. Before any of them could say “Goodbye.”

***

Eddie had perhaps not been grateful enough for his good luck, earlier. As he limped around Its lair, or whatever remained of it, he could see nothing of the intricate spires that had surrounded the crash site earlier. (How much earlier? Not seconds, or the Losers would still be there. Not days either, surely, or he would actually be dead, and he was very insistent that death couldn’t, shouldn’t hurt this much.) 

Now, the place was demolished. The looming tower of ceiling above them looked wider, craggy where it had been claustrophobic before. And, more dramatically, there was no solid ground to walk on. There were boulders, jagged hunks of rock, and loose pebbles smattered all over the floor, which was deeply hard to navigate while knowing that if he fell, he may not ever be able to get up. He only had one working arm, and his strength was tenuous at best. 

What was really miraculous was that nothing had smashed him flat. Out of all the thousands of rocks that fell, only one of them had done any real damage, and even that hadn’t killed him. He should have been squished. Frankly, he should have been

_had been_

dead. And yet, there he stood. Quivering, breathless, and nearly insane from how much every part of him kept hurting, but he stood alive. He held Richie’s jacket to the gaping sound in his chest with his good hand, and he stumbled over the uneven ground. 

His initial assessment of his injuries might have been more optimistic than he thought. His ankle was not supporting his weight as well as he had hoped. More concerning was the way his vision kept spinning. The lair tilted from side to side like Eddie was walking on the deck of a boat in a storm. The ground swayed beneath his feet, but he knew it was solid, knew it had to be.

He would not let despair take him, he told himself. He could handle this. He could handle the sewer, and this sub-sewer, because he was brave. He was so fucking brave. He had killed It (well, almost) and he had gotten Richie out of the deadlights and he had helped defeat this stupid clown twice. His friends (wherever they were) believed in him. So he continued to stumble forward. 

Before he got to the tiny crack that would lead him out, however, he something glinted out of the corner of his eye. Pure white in the midst of the muck and the rocks and the rubble, it shone like a light. Eddie stumbled back over to it, careful to hold the jacket tight and keep his footing. 

There, half-melted on the ground, was his inhaler. The mouthpiece was warped, but he was sure of what it was. It hadn’t burned, just like he’d thought. He held back the laughter again, sure that he would collapse if he started to laugh while he was standing. And man, but his lungs ached. He’d kill for a pull on that thing, but it was damaged beyond all repair. He didn’t have asthma; he didn’t need it. But he still wanted it. 

He walked over towards the inhaler, then ended up walking right past it. Instead he climbed up to where the crater had been, the ground now an impassable mass of rocks. He could smell acrid, black smoke. Something was smoldering there, letting off a dying light.

Eddie leaned as far over the rock nearest it as he could, and a shrill breath of air that wasn’t quite a scream came from his throat. 

IT.

It was dead, looking as melted and distorted as the plastic of Eddie’s inhaler. Whorls of black smoke rose from It, and It seemed to glow a dull, dim orange. Still dying? Or just the last warmth left in an incomprehensible corpse?

Just for good measure, Eddie stamped on the thing. It made no noise, but another puff of smoke jetted out. 

“Bitch,” Eddie said, and made his way back down, down to the exit. He kicked his inhaler, too, reveling in the dull clack of it hitting the stone wall. He got to the crack, the horrible squeeze that hadn’t been fun to crawl through the first time. Slowly, painstakingly, he lowered himself to his stomach, gritted his teeth again, and dragged himself, one handed, through the crack in the stone.

He was, it seemed, leaving on his own after all. Just like he had feared.


	2. Chapter 2

Richie didn’t know why he was in Derry still until he made it to the kissing bridge. His foot eased up on the gas without thought, and he pulled over to the side of the road in a similarly thoughtless manner. He had just stepped out of the car and into the blinding light of the noon-day sun when he was hit, hard as a punch between the eyes, with another memory. One last memory for Derry to throw at him. 

_R +_

It took Richie only seconds to find the old carving. It was pale, faded after 27 years’ time, but still clearly visible. _R + E_. Just letters, innocuous enough that even if Eddie found them he would never know, never suspect. At the time, Eddie never knowing had seemed like a good thing. “Never” had a new meaning in death, though, and the permanency of it all stretched out before Richie like the yawning maw of a great, dark ocean. “Never” had always had a caveat - it would end if one day it hurt less, if one day Eddie confessed to him first. Now, though…

Richie pulled out a pocket knife. It was a weird, boy-scout-y thing to just carry around, and not like Richie, who had even stopped carrying around his favorite Zippo lighter a few years back. Still, he had brought it instinctively on this trip. Like he had known he would want it. Funny, he hadn’t thought to ever use it as a weapon in the sewers. Or against Henry Bowers, or Stan, or really anytime when they could have used a fucking knife. 

Whatever. He guessed instinctually bringing a knife to make himself remember the one person he just wanted to forget wasn’t weirder than Beverly dreaming all their deaths, a town that caused amnesia, or a demon clown living in a sewer system. 

Richie didn’t speak to himself as he carved over the old lines again. Carving the “E” into the wood felt a little bit like he was carving it into his wrists (too early for jokes, Stanny? Not funny, Ben? No one could beep beep his own morbid thoughts) but he did it, and to his deep surprise, he felt better when he was done. 

He stood up and ran his thumb over the raw wood. It was good that he had done this. Even if he forgot, then, at least there would be some sort of memorial-

The thought caught Richie like a blow to the chest. Some sort of memorial. It wasn’t as though Mike had called Eddie’s wife. What could he say if he did? “_Hello, ma’am, I’m sorry to tell you this, but your husband’s dead. No, I can’t prove it, but he died while bravely trying to kill a spider clown a mile beneath the city where you grew up_.”

He would become a missing person, Richie realized, and somehow that thought made him more sick to his stomach than anything else. If his wife knew where he had gone (and she must have, right? Richie didn’t know much about marriage, but married people seemed to know everything about each other) then Derry would be the last place he had been seen. When all the posters of the missing kids had faded or rotten or been pulled down, a missing poster for _Eddie _would hang in their place.

The good feelings were sapped right out of Richie, and for the third time in as many days, he bent double and threw up. 

The last victim of Derry’s curse. The last missing poster. 

Richie wasn’t going to make it all the way to his car, he was sure of that. He slumped down on the ground, his back to the bridge, and put his head between his knees. Deep breaths, right? This was supposed to help something, right? Hadn’t Eddie told him this was a good position to help ease breathing? Richie was having a hell of a fucking time breathing at the moment, and there was no inhaler for whatever was wrong with him.

They left him down there.

It was the thought that he was trying to outrun, that he almost had beaten. They _left him down there_, left him in the sewer, in what came beneath the sewers. They left his corpse to rot with no company but the remains of Pennywise. He was sharing a tomb with that _fucking _clown. 

Richie really wanted to vomit again, but he had barely had anything to eat since Jade of the Orient… how many days ago? He wasn’t hungry, but that probably wasn’t good for him.

_Who cares!?_ A voice in the back of his head shouted, gleeful and hysterical. _Who cares?! You’re still alive, aren’t you?! You made it out alive and you get to leave and forget and die alone while he rots and decays and it’s not your fucking problem-_

“Shut up,” Richie said out loud, still gasping for breath. He was losing it, but there was nothing he could do. Maybe he should have stayed with the others. Maybe it would have been humiliating to break down again, but at least his odds of getting run over were probably lesser.

_Like everyone’s forgotten_, Bill had said. People forgot terrible things in Derry all the time, they’d go insane if they didn’t. How long did a missing person’s case stay open? Long after all the flyers washed away in the rain, surely. Rain would make the face in the poster look more like a corpse. Sagging and warped, gray and bleeding. Dead. Dead, dead, dead.

Richie sat still, trying to breathe deeply until he found that he could. It was really time to run this time, really time to get out. He could be sad, lots of people were sad. He could call his therapist and tell her how _blue _he was about the death of a childhood 

(_love_)

friend, and if he really told her how bad it was she could prescribe him something that could make him stop feeling so much of this, and he would go to a sleazy bar and find a cheap date and he would forget again, cursed or not. It was a great plan, a shallow plan, but one with the gratifying promise of actually making him feel better. 

Richie stood up to get in his car and get the fuck out of Dodge, and he could sight of the stupid letters again. 

_R + E_.

The only memorial he was ever going to get.

“Motherfucker,” Richie said out loud. “You’re never going to let me go, are you?”

He did get back in his car, then, and he turned around and raced towards Neibolt Street.

***

Eddie couldn’t see.

It was too dark without the unearthly light that came from It, and his headlamp was nowhere to be found. The further he got from Its corpse, the harder it became to see anything at all. If he snapped his fingers right in front of his face, he could see a flicker of movement, but that was it.

He could, he supposed, stumble around in the darkness for days without finding the way out, but every time he thought that he begged himself to stop thinking that because if he kept thinking that he would panic and if he panicked he wouldn’t be able to breathe and he didn’t have his inhaler or a backup plan, so it was crucial that he did not panic. 

_Most of your problem is all in your head you’re not sick you’re just scared-_

Yeah, he was scared. But oh, if his GP could see him now. Eddie sure as shit wasn’t imagining this one. Luckily, what he remembered of this cavern was pretty straightforward. If ever Eddie hit a wall, it was easy enough to turn and right himself. All he had to do was to keep following the path until he spotted the faint light that he was certain was streaming from the long, dark hole they had crawled down. They had left the hatch open when they came in, Eddie was fairly certain he remembered that. And the abandoned standpipe had let in bright enough light to see by last time, even in the darkness. He walked and winced and looked and promised himself a private hospital room and a morphine drip when he got out.

Then, Eddie walked face first into a wall. He felt around until his hand found purchase on a crack in it, a small, uneven hole just big enough to squeeze through. A crack he had already crawled out of. He had gone in a circle.

Eddie fell to his knees and finally started to cry.

He wanted to go home. Not home to Myra in their tastefully expensive apartment, not home to Derry, the above ground version. He didn’t even know what he meant himself when he thought about how much he wanted to go home. He had no place in mind, only a feeling, a sense of safety and normalcy and belonging. When he wanted to go home, what he meant was that he wanted off this fucking ride. 

He didn’t even really realize that he was whispering a litany of this under his breath until he heard the hiss of his words echo back to him from the walls of the cavern.

“-home wanna go home wanna go home wanna go-”

He let out a breathless sob. He had to pull himself together, he knew that. There was no other way out, no one coming to get him-

There really was no one coming to get him. He hadn’t been letting himself think about it, but that was true. No light was going to come in because someone had gone up and shut the door. There were no bodies down with him because at some point the others had left. 

Maybe Eddie was dead. Maybe death really was this agonizing, because they wouldn’t have left Eddie behind if he weren’t dead. 

He pressed his forehead against the rock and cried into it. He was lost in the dark and maybe would be forever.

“Just crawl through again, dipshit.”

Eddie’s head snapped up. It was Richie, Richie’s voice, clear and warm as though he were standing right next to him. It didn’t echo damply in the cavern, it came soft and still.

“You’re-” Eddie let out a ragged cough and spoke in a whisper instead. He didn’t have enough of him left to speak louder than that. “You’re not really here. You left.”

“Well, I can see and you can’t, so how ‘bout you take my word for it, Eds.”

Eddie didn’t especially want to take his word for it. He didn’t want to listen to the disembodied voice and keep fighting when it would be so much easier to lay there and wait to die properly. 

“Eddie, come on. Please.”

It sounded like Richie, but it was too soft, too tender to be him. Still, the sound of Richie could lead him anywhere, whether it was real or not. 

Eddie didn’t say anything in confirmation, but he was already on his knees, so all he had to do was crawl forward. The stone was probably scraping at the wound on his gut and he could simply no longer feel it, his nerves too frayed and damaged to notice what was going wrong. He was fighting for nothing, he was certain. A body this damaged might take a while to die, but he would. Maybe he’d even live long enough to make it into a hospital, but he would need transfusions, he would need transplants, he was going to have infection creeping in from multiple wounds. Sepsis, gangrene, loss of limb, it was all possible. 

But Richie wanted him to try, and dying a few meters forward wasn’t any worse than dying there. 

He pushed through the crack and turned so that he was on his back to ease the process of standing. The rocks there were slick, and he slid while trying to get to his feet, landing hard on his ass with a crack through his bones. Sharp, bright dots of pain lit up his spine, ringing where they were too deep to the gaping hold in his abdomen. 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hey, easy!” Richie’s voice came out low and nervous. “Take it easy, Eds.”

The advice of the disembodied voice wasn’t especially helpful as, for a moment, all Eddie could feel was the too-bright throb of pain all through him. Still, the voice did act like a balm to him. It soothed and warmed like a shot of whiskey in his stomach. Eddie stood up again. He took first one shaky step forward, then another. His legs trembled beneath him, threatening to give out, but they held him firmly. He put one foot in front of the other again and again and again until he felt sure his steps were firmly planted and his legs were sure. He couldn’t be positive over the echoing sounds of his own labored breathing, but he thought he heard Richie sigh in relief. 

He kept walking forward in the darkness and the silence for an indeterminate amount of time when he heard Richie’s voice again.

“You should be going straight.”

“I am going straight,” Eddie said.

“You’re veering right,” Richie said. “I understand the primal urge to just wander in the direction your dick leans, but-”

“Shut up!” Eddie cried. His heart felt too thick and heavy, faint as it was. Fake Richie. Pretend Richie. “You shouldn’t talk like that, shouldn’t pretend to be-” he cut himself off. He kept walking, tried to save his breath. The rock beneath him was still slick, and he needed to focus.

“You’re still veering right,” Richie said. He sounded almost apologetic, further proof that this wasn’t Richie. Just another mimic, playing pretend. Not an evil entity, at least. Just Eddie’s head. But then, hadn’t he always been crazy? Hadn’t he always-?

“You are going to want to turn left, Eds.”

“You don’t know shit,” Eddie said. “You are a figment of my imagination and therefore you can only see what I see, which is nothing. So, you can’t possibly know that-”

Eddie’s face smacked right into another wall. His nose stung, his eyes prickled, and a dull ringing began in his ears. _Fuck_. 

“Yeah, so,” Richie’s voice came again. “I would turn left, if I were you.”

There was not enough energy to move and mutter darkly under his breath, so Eddie just turned and kept walking. He walked a little bit faster, ignoring the throb in his enormous wound. His jeans were wet and heavy, and even though they’d waded through sewer water earlier, Eddie suspected that the fresh dampness had less to do with water and more to do with blood, endlessly blood, weighing down his clothes. Bleeding out of him, dragging him down.

He had to keep trying, right? Had to be brave enough to try?

Eddie was of average height and weight. The average human being could lose four pints of blood before dying of shock. Clearly he hadn’t lost that much yet, but still he could feel horrible wetness on the fingers pressing Richie’s jacket to his stomach. The anxiety of not knowing whether or not he would live was somehow worse than the surety of dying.

“You’re not Richie,” Eddie whispered hoarsely. He supposed talking to himself was a waste of energy, but it would keep him distracted from panic. “You sound like him, but you don’t talk right.”

“I’m not Richie,” said Richie’s voice amiably. “But after some deliberation I decided that it would be easiest for you if I sounded like someone who you trusted absolutely.”

Eddie pondered that, then shoved the thought away. Later, he’d deal with it later.

“Who are you, then?” he asked. He stumbled off a small drop in the stone and cried out. His knee slammed into a rock with another sharp burst of pain, and he heard Richie’s gasp in time with his own, a worried, dismayed noise.

“Careful!” he pleaded.

“You’re the one who can see,” Eddie said. He picked himself back up again. He could feel his pulse in his injured knee for a moment. Ka-thud, ka-thud, it seemed strong enough as it throbbed. “Warn a guy, asshole.”

He walked along in silence for a moment, his pace still slow and stuttering.

“Big step up,” Not-Richie said, and Eddie heaved himself up. 

“You’re just about there,” Not-Richie told him. “Climb up to the top of this mound, then start climbing up the rocks all around you.”

“No light?” Eddie asked.

“I’m sorry,” Not-Richie said, which sounded so foreign from Richie’s voice that Eddie let out another pained laugh. 

Eddie climbed until he felt jagged rocks encircling him, and knew that it was vertical from there. He took Richie’s jacket away from his stomach and draped it over once shoulder instead, and took a deep, painful breath. A straight, vertical climb up wet rocks with one working arm while he bled to death. 

He wouldn’t have had to be a risk analyst to tell any dumbass that the odds weren’t great.

“Stay with me?” he asked the voice of Definitely-Not-Richie in his head.

“Until you are safe,” Not-Richie agreed. “Maybe I’ll even show you who I am, if you make it to the top.”

“If,” Eddie muttered. “You’d think my hallucinations would be more encouraging. 

The imaginary Richie in his head laughed, and the sound soothed Eddie from the inside out. He then took hold of a jutting rock with his good hand and began to pull himself up.

***

Eddie was always the one who noticed things. 

This wasn’t a perfect talent as sometimes he noticed things that weren’t there, like hidden illnesses and bullies around corners that were really just shadows, but in general, it was a skill. He was the first to notice if you were sick or sad or 

_missing_

if something was wrong. 

Bill should have been the one to notice. He had always thought so. He had a tendency to take the lead, and a real leader would know if his friends were hurt, if they needed him. 

As far as Bill was concerned, floating on his back and letting the sun warm his face, he’d never done anything the way he should have. All he’d ever done was get people killed. Georgie, Stan, the kid with the skateboard, and now-

The cold of the quarry water was seeping in under his skin, chilling him to the core. No amount of summer sun was going to fix this and make him warm. Mike had his escape. Ben had Beverly. Beverly had her freedom. And Bill had the ball and chain of his guilt, dragging him down under whenever he tried to come up for air.

He defeated It this time. And It wouldn’t, couldn’t, kill anyone else ever again. But deep down he knew it wasn’t enough to make him stop aching like this.

He stood up slowly, slowly waded to the side of the quarry, and climbed out in halting steps, letting more water shower down with every motion. Then he turned and gave the losers one last, fond smile. 

“I’m gonna head out too.”

The three of them turned to look at him, mingled expressions of dismay on their faces. 

“You aren’t gonna hang around for a bit, Bill?” Mike asked. And he looked so hopeful that Bill almost said yes, but… But he couldn’t stand to be in Derry. Already whatever had driven him to come back, and now something was pulling him away, a forceful tug that was just telling him to get _out_, to go. 

“Nah,” Bill said, shaking droplets of water out of his hair. “I think my wife is already going to skin me alive of the days I’ve taken off. Better not make it worse than it already is. But I’ll call you guys. We should try and stay in touch this time, yeah?”

“Definitely,” Beverly said. She smiled at Bill, a sad smile, but a content one. She’d found what she was looking for all along, and underneath his grief and his guilt, Bill was happy for her. He’d found the woman that made him feel like that, and now she’d found the man. They weren’t tangled up anymore.

Bill gave them one last look, and walked away. 

He was still dripping when he made it to the side of the road, his shoes squelching from the water that had gotten into them. He hadn’t driven there, of course, but a walk in the sun might dry him off. It would give him too much time to think, too much time for his thoughts to run wild and torture him, but it was better than asking for a ride.

Bill had only begun to walk down the shoulder of the road when a streak of red shot by him. The car missed him by feet, the wind that followed it knocking him over anyway. It was going two, maybe three times the legal limit, and Bill was all ready to curse at the driver when he realized that he recognized the car.

It was Richie’s shiny red Mustang, Richie’s still damp head behind the wheel, and it wasn’t going out of town.

It was going back in the direction of Neibolt street.

And Bill didn’t have a fucking car with him.

Bill sprinted back down to the quarry, skidding on the rocks and grass and nearly plunging face first into the rocks multiple times, but eventually he stumbled out into the sunshine once more, a stitch in his side, gasping for breath.

“Bill?”

“Richie!” he said, his stutter gone again. 

“What about him?” Ben asked. Ben was standing in the shallows at once, his chest pushed out and his shoulders set, ready to dive back into the fray. They all were, Bill realized distantly. The three of them stood, tense and ready for whatever came next, and he loved them fiercely for it.

“His car,” bill said. “I saw him driving back- back towards Neibolt street. I think he’s going to go back for Ed-”

This time, he couldn’t finish the word. He didn’t stutter over Eddie’s name, his mouth simply refused to let it come out. 

“For his body?” Beverly asked. Her voice was barely a whisper, but Bill heard it loud and clear as a knife driven into his ear. He nodded. 

Then the three of them ran out of the quarry, water spraying from then as they did. Bill led the way back up to their cars, and he knew that he should’ve seen earlier, should’ve noticed and paid more attention earlier. It should have been obvious that Richie wasn’t okay to be alone.

But, after all, Eddie had always been around, and he had always been the one that noticed things like that.

***

It was just before Eddie saw the distant light that he had the thought of falling.

He’d had the _fear _of falling the whole time he climbed, of course, but he realized at a certain point, his good arm shaking with effort and his sprained ankle shooting darts of pain up his leg, that if he wanted to die quicker, he could just let go. He’d never thought of suicide before, nor did he especially want to die, but-

But. It would be faster than waiting to bleed out.

He tried to shake the thought away immediately, horrified by it, and perhaps Not-Richie sensed what he was thinking because he sounded angry when he spoke again.

“Just keep moving, Eds. You’re getting close.”

“How fucking close?” Eddie spat out through gritted teeth. 

“Real fucking close,” Not-Richie said. “Look up.”

Doing so much as craning his neck seemed to somehow twinge the puncture wound, but Eddie looked up anyway, and saw nothing but rocks. Not-Richie sighed, he moved up another foot, and he blinked. 

No, not just rocks. There was, faint but visible, a faint outline of silvery-gray. A circle of light, like light that came through the crack in a doorway. Like the little, circular hatch that had let them down into Pennywise’s lair in the first place. Like-

“That’s it?” Eddie whispered, and was embarrassed to hear that it came out like a whimper before he remembered that Richie wasn’t really there and there was no one for him to be embarrassed around. It was still achingly far away, but now Eddie could see it. It was really there, and this wasn’t some awful purgatory, there was an ending in sight. 

“Yeah, c’mon, Wheezy, you got this!” Not-Richie said. 

_Braver than you think_.

Eddie mashed his mouth into a hard line and climbed with new vigor. He was close, so fucking close he could imagine the feeling of sunlight on his clammy skin, so close he could taste-

The jacket on his shoulder began to slip, and Eddie gasped. He wasn’t stupid enough to let go, so he slammed his shoulder up against the wall, trapping it before it could fall. 

“Fat fucking chance,” he muttered. He rubbed his shoulder against the wall, sliding the jacket back into place, and continued to climb. When he was only feet from the door, he had another panicky thought.

“Will it be locked?” he asked aloud.

“No,” Richie’s voice said, sounding strangely amused. “Doors like these never are.”

“How will I open it? I’ve got no free hands?” Eddie said. 

“Just push, dumbass,” Not-Richie said. “With your head.”

“Oh, right, obvious,” Eddie said sarcastically. He climbed up until his legs were as high as they could go, and then nudged the door open with the top of his head.

The hatch blew back with surprising ease, and then there was sunlight. A shaky laugh escaped him and Eddie almost cried, almost fell backwards out of sheer relief, but he dragged his way out, then collapsed on his back on the wood, staring up at the shattered gray remains of the standpipe.

The damage of whatever the fuck had happened was more obvious in this room, where they had thought they defeated It the first time. The walls that had been made of smooth, round stone were now as cracked and craggy as the endless rocky throat of Pennywise’s lair. Huge chunks of missing wall let in even more sunlight, and the ground was littered with rubble, but the passage into the sewers was not yet blocked.

Eddie laid on the dank, damp wood next to the hatch, surrounded by broken stones and ruins, and he laughed up at the sun. He looked down at his jeans and discovered that they were saturated with his blood, stained just so down from his midsection to make it look like he pissed himself (if he pissed red and black, that was). That thought made him laugh even harder.

“See,” he whispered. “If you were really Richie, you would be making fun of me.”

But Eddie heard no response. He lifted his head and looked around - but of course, he saw no one there.

“Richie!” he called hoarsely. He sat up slowly, with more trembling than before. The chamber was entirely empty but for him. 

“Hello!” he called again, but of course, it had only ever been his imagination. Maybe now that there was light, he would have no need for such hallucinations to carry him out of this hell hole. 

He stood all the way up, finding that it was a little bit harder than it had been the last time, but that he could still do it. He stumbled down the mound of detritus to the sewer water, distressed to see how high it was. He was just getting ready to lower himself into the water and pray that the gray water didn’t draw out all the blood (infection was something he had resigned himself to already) when he saw something moving in the water.

Eddie had no weapons. There was nothing he could grab, and all he was holding onto was Richie’s leather jacket, which wouldn’t do jack shit against a monster, but Eddie held it out in front of himself like a shield and braced himself against the island.

“Stay back!” he croaked out. “I’m not fucking scared of you!”

There was nothing but the ambient sound of water sloshing against the sides of the rocks and trash. Eddie lowered the jacket and saw, staring up at him from the edge of the little island, a large turtle. Not huge, Eddie thought, not the size of a sea turtle, but larger than any of the wood or box turtles he saw in the woods when he played in the barrens as a kid. This turtle looked like a common enough wood turtle, but its shell was the size of an end table, and it was staring directly at Eddie with bright, intelligent eyes.

Eddie took a hesitant step closer to the turtle. It stayed still. He took his first step into the water, and the turtle swam right up to him, and nudged his leg with its head. 

“What, dude?” Eddie asked the turtle, feeling like an absolute idiot as he did. 

The turtle nudged him again. Eddie stepped all the way into the water, nearly up to his waist, and the turtle swam underneath him, coming up between Eddie’s legs so that Eddie was seated on its back.

“Whoa, hold on, this is not normal behavior for a reptile what are you DOING?!” Eddie cried, then grabbed the lip of the turtle’s shell. It pulled him across to the sewer entrance, then nudged him again with its head as if trying to help him up.

“Um,” Eddie said. His vision was starting to get hazy, and this was absolutely a hallucination, if nothing else was. “Th-thank you? Not-Richie?”

The big turtle dove back into the water with a quiet splash, leaving Eddie in the mouth of the sewer.

“Okay,” Eddie said. “Yeah, okay, sure.”

It was time to move on, he knew. Already his limbs felt heavier and taking in air was a heavy labor, and whatever magic was helping him seemed to be wearing off. He walked back into the sewers, for what he hoped would be the last time ever.

***

Mike couldn’t explain why, but he was convinced that they weren’t finished yet. Maybe it was how long he had been in Derry, he thought at first. Maybe It had just poisoned his thinking to the point that he would never think the job was over. But when they left Neibolt, when they went to the quarry, something felt incomplete. Something felt wrong.

So, Mike wasn’t as surprised as Ben and Beverly seemed to be that they were chasing Richie back to whatever remained of the house on Neibolt street. He knew there was something left. Derry had left him with a fine-tuned sense of intuition, and he was sure that they weren’t done. But he had no idea what would be left. It was dead, the scars were gone, and there was nothing left to do.

“You don’t think he thinks Eddie’s really still alive down there, do you?” Ben asked. “I mean, I know he was doing bad, but-”

“I don’t think so,” Bill said. “I think Bev was right and he wants to go back for the body. But he could still hurt himself in all the rubble and-”

It was strange, not hearing Bill stutter and still knowing that he couldn’t get out all his sentences. Mike thought he understood, though. They couldn’t lose someone else. Couldn’t be down to just four. He’d spent so many years wishing for the losers to come back but knowing that coming back could kill them. Now that Eddie was dead-

No, Mike would drag Richie away a thousand times. No one else had to die in Derry. At the very least, not another one of them. 

“Ah, Bill? Wrong turn,” Ben said from the backseat. Bill whipped around in a very illegal U-turn that made the lone other driver on the street honk at them.

“How many times have you come here?” Beverly asked, looking a little amused, a little fond.

“I’ve only ever come by bike!” Bill said. “Look, he can’t be far, and Mike, you still have extra flashlights, right? We just have to find wherever the well is under all the rubble, go down and get him back out.”

“I don’t even think we’re going to have to do that much,” Beverly said. 

Mike looked up and out of the window. There was what was left of number 29, just a jagged patch of broken wood sticking up out of its sunken in basement. And there, at the edge of what had once been the porch, there was Richie, tossing aside tiny scraps of boards. The pile next to him was miniscule, and even as Mike watched, he stopped pulling up bits of the house. Richie stood up, shoulders shaking and otherwise unmoving. For a moment, Mike wondered what he was stopping for before he realized oh, he had just stopped to _cry_.

He had no idea that Richie felt this much under the veneer of jokes and nonchalance. Not until today, not really.

“C’mon,” Beverly said. The car hadn’t stopped all the way before she threw open the door and ran out.

As she did, Mike couldn’t help but notice that she had a flashlight in one hand and a coil of rope in the other.

***

Eddie suspected that the sewers weren’t supposed to be swaying. Yet, they did, and every now and then they rocked so violently that he stumbled into one wall of another, having to throw out his good arm to catch himself before he face-planted into the water. (Again.) He knew where to go this time, and though the sewers were dark, they were not nearly so dark as the chamber he had been in before. 

Last time leaving these fucking sewers, he told himself. He would never even acknowledge a sewer after this. He would move to the woods and shit in a hole to avoid sanitation works. Or, okay, probably not, but it wasn’t the worst idea he had ever had. No more clowns, no more sewers, no more Derry: all he had to do was get out of the sewers.

And then he supposed he had to get out of Neibolt and find someone to take him to a hospital before he bled to death in the streets as opposed to in a cave. 

The sewers were easy to find his way through, though. Eddie had a good head for directions, and it was technically his fourth time going through this network of tunnels. Finding his way back to the well was only difficult when he had to climb up onto a ledge or the water went higher than his knees and had any sort of current. Then it threatened to knock him over, but usually if Eddie gripped the wall, his strength would come back to him enough to keep trudging forward.

He crawled through the final tunnel, trying not to gag at the sickening sensation of the sewer water lapping against the wound on his stomach. Then, the tunnel ended and he looked up to the top of the well-

Only to find it covered.

This was the darkest part of the sewer yet because no light was filtering in from Neibolt, and Eddie couldn’t understand. 

“Hey, imaginary Richie? Are you still there?” he called out, trying not to sound scared. Trying to sound _brave. _“I could really use a hand right now!”

Imaginary Richie didn’t respond. 

This, Eddie thought, was going to be a hell of a lot more difficult to climb with only one hand, but he was almost there. Once he got to the top of this he was done, he was out. He climbed, his bad arm clamped around the rope just past the elbow, his feet grabbing at footholds in the wall, and once he was stable, reaching higher up the rope with his good arm and yanking. 

The going was impossibly slow, and it would have been a hard climb with both arms. Had been a hard climb with both arms. As it was, his still cold and clammy skin was sweat-soaked when he got to the top, and his every muscle felt like it was about to give out. But surely the well had some small wooden cover, easy enough to knock aside with his head like the hatch they had used before. 

With the very last of his strength, Eddie stretched up and pressed his head against the wood covering the well. And nothing happened.

He could feel the wood on his head, feel the solidity of it, but it didn’t budge. Eddie knocked his head against it again, harder this time, but while it made his head ache, it didn’t shift the wood.

“Hey!” he cried, a hoarse breath of air. There was no volume left in him. “Hey! Hey, c’mon, what the fuck, let me out!”

“I’m proud of you, Eddie.”

Not-Richie’s voice came again as though he were right next to Eddie, and Eddie’s muscles were luckily locked too tightly in place for him to lose his grip and fall. “You did so good, man.”

And oh, didn’t that sound nice? Hadn’t Eddie waited years to hear someone

_Richie_

say he was proud of Eddie and Eddie to know he deserved it. But it wasn’t fair. He wasn’t done. He wasn’t out. He was stuck.

“Richie, or, Mr. Turtle, or whatever the fuck you are, don’t do this shit,” Eddie pleaded. “Why can’t I get out?”

“The house collapsed, Eds,” Not-Richie’s voice drifted towards him again, lazy. “They had to leave or they would have been crushed.”

“I came all this way…. For nothing?” Eddie asked. “Just to die here?”

“No, no,” Not-Richie said, his voice soothing, calming. “You made it, okay? This was all you needed to do.”

“What I _need _is for you to fucking explain yourself!” Eddie tried to shout, but there was no force in his words. It whispered, rippled.

“You defeated It,” the voice said, and it no longer sounded like Richie. It sounded paternal, somehow, a cross between Bill’s adult voice and something Eddie had heard a long time ago, a distant memory of his father. “All of you, you killed It. I couldn’t help you destroy It, but I could grant you one miracle. One way to say thank you for all you’ve done. This is as far as you need to go. The universe can take it from here.”

Eddie stayed still for only a moment, dumbfounded. He was hazy, he realized. Too hazy to deal with this, too hazy to think about this. He could feel himself running out of time as clearly as he could feel the blood draining from him, leaving him a little more empty and hollow with every passing minute.

“No,” Eddie said.

“I- what?” 

“No,” Eddie said. “Thanks for the help and all, but no. If I’ve learned one goddamn thing about Derry it’s that you can’t trust anyone but yourself and your friends. Not adults, not police, and sure as shit not the general kindliness of the universe.”

“Eddie, you’re nearly safe! You don’t understand, all you need do is wait-”

“This is my fucking miracle,” Eddie said, and he found a higher foothold, one that brought his foot up to the height of his waist. Then he found another, and another, until he was leaning backwards, blood dripping sickeningly into the back of his throat. 

“And I’m getting out of the goddamn sewer, too,” he said, and then he kicked the wood covering the well. 

The wood shuddered, and the voice that followed Eddie was either dumbstruck or simply done talking to him. 

Eddie smiled, not a happy smile, but a ferocious grimace, one of whatever base chemicals came when there was no adrenaline left. He kicked the wood again, and again it shuddered, this time shifting a little. One slant ray of sunlight filtered through, lighting up the dirt and dust in the well.

“Come on,” Eddie whispered. He held onto the rope with all the strength he had left. He pushed all the way off the side of the well with his feet, planted both of them on the wood, and kicked.

***

Richie was trying to get his shit back together. He had been holding up pretty well, he thought. He had made the drive fine, hadn’t killed a single pedestrian in his rush to get back. There had been a close call, but whatever. He had made it up to the house before realizing just how hopelessly broken it was, the whole basement filled with the remains of the place, but that was fine, too. There was still a knocking sound coming from the ground, bits and pieces of wood still settling, he supposed, but the rest of it was probably already firmly in place, safe enough to crawl through. All Richie had to do was pull the broken boards out of the hole and find the well and crawl down and-

He had eventually broken down. It was insane, this whole thing was completely fucking insane, but he couldn’t just leave Eddie down there, alone in the dark. He couldn’t go away and know that Derry was full of missing posters with his face on them. He couldn’t leave Eddie with no better memorial than the initials he’d carved when he was a scared thirteen year old. 

He stood to go to the back of the house, closer to where the well was, when he heard someone cry out behind him.

“Richie!” 

Richie spun around to see… all the rest of the Losers. All of them running up to him, staring, afraid. Bill looked like he might cry, but Richie had no patience for that shit today. 

“What do you want?” he asked, and his voice sounded horrible. Like he’d been crying, or something. Embarrassing. He was still holding up a splintered board, almost brandishing it. 

“Richie,” Bill said, his voice pleading.

“This is insane!” Ben told him. “You can’t get yourself killed for-”

“For what?!” Richie asked. “For Eddie? I can and I will.”

“You can’t get yourself killed for a body,” Ben said. He looked like he might cry as well, but Richie didn’t care. He’d been crying all fucking day, and Ben could deal with it.

“I am not asking anyone to come with me, and in fact, I kind of wish all of you would stop following me,” Richie said. “I want to deal with this, okay?! I want to be alone! And I’m going to go bring back his body, because I- I know he’s dead! Okay? I get it! I get that you were all doing a very brave and noble thing when you ran off but I don’t give a shit! He’s not staying down there, not while I can do something about it.”

Richie paused, shoulders heaving like he’d just run a mile. He realized that he was standing at the head of the group, all the losers clustered in front of him in the front yard of the house, and he laughed, just a tiny bit.

“Jesus, I took your fuckin’ spot, huh, Bill?” he said. Bill didn’t smile back at him. “Do you feel like an asshole when you give these speeches? I feel like an asshole right now.”

No one said anything. They just looked up at him with the same, sad, pitying faces they’d been giving him all day, so Richie took a deep breath and kept going.

“It doesn’t matter if he’s dead,” Richie said. “It doesn’t matter if this place is full of rubble, okay, I just have to try- he has a _wife_, for fuck’s sake, and- and how fucking long are we going to let people just wonder? What if we leave, and we forget, and no one fucking knows he’s down there?!”

The faces of the Losers changed, though Richie didn’t think he had convinced them. He wondered vaguely if he’d said something wrong, because suddenly the four of them standing there were wide eyed, looking disbelieving and horrified at him.

“What? Look, we- you guys don’t have to come, but if you want to help, I won’t stop you. But he was always so- do you know what happens to corpses?! Do you know how they _rot_?!” He sounded like Eddie but he would deal with that later. “They putrefy and-”

“Richie!” Beverly whispered.

“-start to fucking ooze and he wouldn’t want that, he was always afraid of that-”

“Richie!” Ben cried, abject terror on his face.

“-nails and teeth keep growing he doesn’t deserve that he deserves a tomb-”

“R-R-R-” Bill tried, Richie thought his stutter was gone, but for some reason Bill didn’t seem capable of saying anything.

“-we can’t just fucking leave him to _decay_-!”

“Beep-beep, Richie!”

The voice came from behind Richie. From the remains of 29 Neibolt. Richie froze, all his muscles tense with fear and disbelief, and slowly, so slowly, he turned around.

Richie’s tears sprang to his eyes immediately. It wasn’t real - it couldn’t be real, because Eddie had already died. He’d been still and cold in Richie’s arms.

But there he stood, bloody and shaking and gray, looking more like a corpse than a human person, Eddie stood amongst the wreckage of the house. He was painted in blood and sewer muck, dusted over with dust from the foundation stones, and the bandage had fallen off his cheek at some point. His arm jutted out at a hideous angle, and his eyes looked sunken, dark and hollow where they had been so bright just yesterday. He looked like a zombie, like a body, like a leper.

But it was Eddie, and he was alive.

“Eddie,” Richie whispered.

“I can’t-” Eddie began, and he stumbled forward. He wasn’t doing so hot at walking, and Richie thought, distantly, that he ought to go help him, yet shock had him rooted to the spot. Eddie fell as much as he walked coming closer to them to talk. It was good, Richie thought, a little hysterically. He was so hard to hear, whispering the way he did, slurring his words together. When he got closer, he spoke again. “I can’t- can’t believe you’re here? Were you… coming back for me?”

“Uh-huh,” Beverly said. She sounded wide-eyed and horrified, but nothing in the universe could make Richie tear his eyes away from Eddie to check.

“So,” Eddie said. His voice rasped, wet and ragged when he spoke. “So, you’re telling me I came up here for fucking nothing? I could’ve just, like, waited down there? You were coming to find me?”

Richie found his voice again.

“No way, man,” he said. His voice was coming out breathy too, barely a whisper. “I was- I was coming back for my jacket.”

Eddie laughed. It was an awful sound, awful and somehow the most wonderful sound Richie had heard in his entire fucking life.

“It’s my jacket now, fuckface,” he said, smiled a bloody grin, and held in one fist Richie’s jacket. Richie laughed in disbelief.

“Hey, Rich?” Eddie said. He was shaking, unsteady, a Jenga tower ready to topple at a moment’s notice. “Is it, uh, cool if I pass out now?”

Richie nodded once, and Eddie’s knees buckled. 

Only then did Richie’s own legs finally unlock, and he ran forward, grabbing Eddie before he hit the ground.

“Hey man, hey,” Richie said. His hands were shaking, one holding Eddie up by his back, the other pushing hair out of Eddie’s eyes. “Hey, it’s okay, it’s all right, you’re okay, I got you.”

Eddie’s eyelids fell shut, and the corners of his lips pulled up in another, less gruesome smile. A soft, Eddie-smile.

“I know,” he said. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey, gang, is it too weird? hope not! sorry this took so long to update, this chapter is. um. longer than i expected. hope to post again very soon to give y'all the cannon reddie we fucking deserve.


	3. The Boys (and Bev) are Back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie survived, and now there are logistics to be dealt with, which is marginally easier than feelings.

_“Eds, please tell me you became a doctor._”

Once upon a time, in another life, Eddie had considered medical school. He had a long talk with his high school guidance counselor in his junior year about what he wanted out of his future. She suggested medical school, and Eddie agreed that it might be a good idea. He did well in biology, chemistry, and anatomy. He was a student aid for the school nurse one year and he thrived there. He was also working with at a mechanic shop at the time, and he knew from that that he liked working with his hands, and he liked to know the intricacies of how complex machines functioned. Weren’t humans just another type of machine, really? He had reasonably steady hands and nimble fingers, and the idea of surgery or emergency services was appealing to him. It was the sort of stable, unambiguously helpful job that seemed simple. He would never have to wonder if he was doing the right thing if he worked in a hospital. He started tailoring a college application for pre-med, and then-

And then there had been his mother. Who had cried that medicine had once been a good profession but now it was corrupt and more than that it was dangerous. Did he want to work around all that blood? Holding a scalpel himself? What about c. diff? What about AIDS? What about blood-borne pathogens, Eddie, don’t you know this isn’t safe?

At first, he didn’t want to listen. But. But then he thought about the blood. He thought about AIDS and c. diff and all the horrible, awful, risk. So, he took statistics instead and sometimes looked at the scrubs in the college bookstore with a feeling somewhere between desire and sadness, with a kind of nostalgia for the person he could have been. And then, he bought his math textbook and moved on. 

Even so, he spent a lot of time at the nursing school. He made friends taking medical classes, and he took practical first aid classes, because you never knew when it might come in handy. As such, he made a lot of friends in the field, and his best friend in college and up until Eddie turned thirty was a guy named Austin who worked as an EMT and didn’t believe in sheltering Eddie the way his mother and his wife did. Austin told Eddie horror stories about the job, all of which Eddie found morbidly fascinating. Gang members going into emergency surgery after getting their throats slit. Pregnant women with waterfalls of blood between their legs. One man whose hand had been ground to a stump by his garbage disposal. 

Eddie had never heard a story of someone surviving injuries such as his. So far as he could tell the human midsection was packed with organs necessary to live. If someone was impaled and their spine and spinal cord were miraculously unharmed, and neither their renal nor femoral arteries were pierced, and they did not simply die of shock…

And, and, and.

Eddie’s spine was not severed. Neither of his lungs had been punctured, he knew, and was grateful for. He had nothing to help him breathe, now. But he also knew the human body could only lose so much blood. It could only function for so long without a working liver or stomach or thick, heavy veins pumping blood to and from its limbs. 

This was all to say that, as Eddie lay in Richie’s arms, he still couldn’t be sure he was going to survive to see another day. He was - well, maybe not walking and talking, but a bleeding and fainting liability. An insurance nightmare. Eddie knew the fucking odds. A case like him would rack up a few hundred thousand in medical bills, waste a few liters of donated blood, maybe even a donated organ or two, then die when infection swam through all the shiny new blood and body parts. Odds of survival: not fucking great. 

But, as Eddie looked up at Richie, his face framed with hazy sunlight, and as he felt Richie’s hand smoothing back his hair, soft and tender as Eddie had never known him before, he couldn’t bring himself to care. This was enough. If he died within minutes, this had been worth fighting for. One more moment in the sun. One more minute with Richie, with people who loved him. 

Eddie’s vision was still swimming, so it was not as easy to see Richie as he would have liked, but he could still make out the glint of light on his broken glasses. He could see the shape of his lips as they moved - was he saying something? Eddie strained to listen.

“...got you,” Richie promised. 

“I know,” Eddie said, and he did. 

Wriggling out of the well had been the second hardest part, right after kicking it open in the first place. He hadn’t been able to fully dislodge the debris that had covered his exit, but he’d made a whole just wide enough to drag himself out of. It had pulled and ripped at the wound on his abdomen horribly, renewing the pain radiating from the very core of him. But by the time he was out, properly out, he could hear Richie talking. The sun was so bright it was nearly blinding, but he had done it. He had stumbled over, and when he knew he didn’t have to stay standing anymore, he had fallen. 

Whatever had helped him out of the sewers had been right. Richie’s was a voice he trusted absolutely. Now that he was out, the last dregs of feral strength that had carried Eddie out drained from him almost instantaneously. He was so very tired, but that was okay, because now he could be tired, he could be weak. 

“Guys?!” Richie shouted, the sound muffled to Eddie’s ears. He sounded panicked, though. Sounded afraid. Eddie wanted to tell him that it was okay, that he’d made it out and he’d _done it_, they didn’t have to worry anymore, but that was a lot of words, and his speech was coming out more slurred than it had before. “Guys-! Ben, help me-?”

“Got him, yeah-”

“Careful, be careful not to-”

“Jesus, how did he-?”

“Ben!”

Something knocked into Eddie’s mangled arm and a thin scream escaped him. His vision went crystal clear and tinged with red for a fraction of a second, long enough to see the Losers huddled around him, an expression of abject horror on Ben’s face.

“I don’t know where to-”

“Not his fucking arm; you have eyes, don’t you?”

“Easy, easy, just lift him from the other side-”

“He’s still bleeding-”

“I can walk,” Eddie said, trying to sound cool and nonchalant and derisive. It came out a little more like “Uh c’n w’k,” but Ben at least seemed to understand what he had said. He helped Eddie to his feet with a frankly unfair amount of ease, and slung Eddie’s good arm around his shoulder. 

“You sure about this, Eds?” Ben’s voice hit his ear like a car crash, and Eddie decided that perhaps he shouldn’t have let his dogged determination escape so quickly. All the sensations of the world were slamming into him from different sides at chaotic intervals, and somehow he had lost sight of Richie’s face. He managed to shake his head before slumping against Ben fully, and thinking that that was a decent outfit and it was a shame Eddie was getting it so soaked with blood.

“Eddie, Eddie, fuck!” 

His right arm sang with renewed pain, but his friends did not let him hit the ground. Then his feet were no longer touching the earth and there were arms under his legs and his back. Someone cradled Eddie to their chest. Whoever held him was warm, pleasantly so, and Eddie leaned his head into them. He hadn’t realized how clammy cold he was until he felt the emanating warmth from them. 

“Get the door,” Richie said from above Eddie’s head. His voice was strained with effort. 

“Rich, I can carry him if-”

“Just get it!” 

The swaying motion that accompanied Richie walking forward with him was disorienting and a little bit nauseating, but Richie held Eddie fast, and he had no fear of falling.

“My car’s faster.”

“Your car barely has a backseat and he needs to lay down-”

“He _needs _to get to a hospital as soon as possible!”

“Just get in the fucking back, Richie!”

Eddie’s arm was jostled again and he let out a cry of pain before he could bite back the noise. Richie whined, an echo of Eddie’s pain, and for the life of him Eddie couldn’t think of comforting to say. 

Richie could, though, and he whispered: “C’mon, Eds, I know, I know it hurts, but we’re almost in, just hold tight.”

Eddie could do no such thing, but he nodded into Richie’s chest anyway. A different pair of hands was pushing on his legs, the pain in his ankle twinging but not screaming out, then Richie pulled him in ever closer, and a door thumped shut. 

Then there were the crunching sounds of footsteps on gravel, more opening and shutting of car doors, the now soothingly familiar sound of the grown-up Losers bickering amongst themselves (“You get in the back!” “No, I have a first-aid kid-!” “Ride with Mike!”) and the soft ringing of the car itself, letting them know that doors were not shut and seatbelts were not buckled. (Seatbelts were one of the best ways to prevent car accidents as was avoiding distracted driving not calling not texting not driving when emotionally compromised were they emotionally compromised?)

Under all these sounds, though, Eddie could hear one softer sound. Directly above him was ragged, wet gasping, exhales coming in soft whines, a voice that sounded familiar but incongruent. Richie’s very breath seemed to come out as Eddie’s name in a harsh but reverent whisper: “_Eddie, Eddie, Eddie_.”

Something hot and wet fell on Eddie’s cheek, and with great, great effort, Eddie opened his eyes and forced them to focus, Richie’s contorted face swimming into view. 

“M’sorry,” Eddie said. “I was doing fine earlier, I swear.”

“Christ, Eddie,” Richie sounded like he was trying to talk around something thick, his voice was so stunted. “You don’t have anything to apologize for.”

“Does anyone’s phone still work?” Bev’s voice, Eddie thought.

“No, don’t you know where the hospital is?”

“Don’t you?!”

“It’s downtown like everything else!” Richie shouted, turning away from Eddie before he did so that Eddie didn’t take the force of the words. “Will you just start fucking driving?!”

“Richie, calm down, it’s gonna be okay.”

“I will not fucking calm down!”

Another warm drop on Eddie’s face. But Richie wasn’t bleeding, and there wasn’t a leak from the ceiling of the car. He was crying, Eddie realized dully. Had he ever seen Richie cry before?

“Must be bad,” Eddie said. “My doctor is- shit- he’s never gonna fucking believe this.”

“Save your breath, you should-”

“Lungs are-” Eddie coughed, his whole torso twitching and burning with the effort “-fine. For once.”

He was so tired, so safe, so warm, and succumbing to the sleepiness would be easy as breathing - easier, at this point - but Eddie had not fought to go to sleep. He had fought for this, the view and the company, so he kept his gaze fixed on Richie, and let it warm him from the inside out.

The car kicked to life, and the strange, empty sense of nausea overcame Eddie again. He supposed it wasn’t as though he could throw up. His stomach could convulse, but there wasn’t much left of it to cause him to gag. It was, ironically, a sickening thought. 

“Okay,” Ben was talking now, the more Eddie tried to pay attention, the minutely easier it got. “Okay, this is going to be… rough. Richie-

***

“-can you hold him still?”

Richie looked feral when he turned to Ben, his face that of a wild and wounded animal. He was red and blotchy and either very sad, very angry, or both. 

Ben swallowed, and refused to back down. He did not look away, but held his gaze steady against Richie’s, waiting for permission. 

At last, Richie nodded, and Ben pulled a small pair of scissors out of his little first-aid kit. Richie made some small noise of protest, and Ben looked up at him, tried to keep his voice level and calm. Level and calm, he could be level and calm and the mature, sensible, grown up one, and he could fall apart later.

“Eddie,” Ben said, partially because talking to him was easier than Richie, and in part because he thought it would make Richie a little more amenable. “I need to cut off the shirt, okay? My turn to perform emergency surgery on you, yeah? Like you did when Bowers beat me up?”

Eddie made a noise of what Ben thought was assent. He had spoken a little, but it his speech was garbled with blood and exhaustion and the fact that he was still clearly dying. He looked like-

Well. He looked like he’d been left for dead in a sewer a few hours ago. _Hours_. Almost a day.

Ben sliced through the blood-soaked fabric as quickly as he could with the tiny scissors, no better than nail clippers, really. He pushed the two sides of Eddie’s shirt off and made no face but for the widening of his eyes when he saw the gaping wound left behind. 

Some of the blood must have been washed away by sewer water, which, while disgusting, made it easier for Ben to see what he was working with. This thought was made slightly less comforting by the fact that most of Eddie’s stomach looked like it was gone, replaced by the ragged hole and chunks of meat and blood. Ben’s plan had been to try and tape it up to slow the bleeding, buy them a little more time because he suspected they didn’t have much left. 

But this, this here - what the fuck was he supposed to tape up? What could he do that would do any fucking good at all?

He took a deep breath, and kept going for three reasons that immediately floated to the top of his mind. The first and most selfish was that if he gave up or called it hopeless Richie would murder him. Possibly literally. Ben didn’t want to test it. The second and best reason was that it was _Eddie_. Eddie who had put him back together so long ago, who had been an annoying little brat, sometimes, but always fiercely caring, fiercely defensive, loyal to a fault. Eddie who had almost died for them.

The third reason came as though from outside Ben’s own mind. A voice from far away that didn’t sound like his internal monologue but like something completely foreign said _You can. You can and you have to_.

Ben took the medical tape out and ripped off a long strip with one hand, then with the other he clamped the wound shut as best he could. It was _big_, yeah, but he could almost get one side of unbroken skin to touch the other, and when he did, he taped it tight. Distantly, Ben knew he was causing a stir. He could hear Eddie’s gasp and Richie’s cry and he knew that this had to hurt, but he knew just as firmly that he had to keep going. He did the same on the other side, making a sterile white ‘X’ over the black and red and deep, garish brown that covered the rest of Eddie. 

Once it was taped as well as Ben possibly could, he turned and rummaged in his box for a piece of gauze to cover it with, and hopefully to staunch a little bit more blood with as well. It wasn’t the _best _job, and in fact he wasn’t sure it was even a _good _job, but it was better than nothing. 

But, of course, It had pierced Eddie all the way through, which meant…

“Richie,” Ben said, his voice low, barely daring to look up. 

“What?” Richie asked. His voice was also low, close to what Ben could call a snarl, and it was not about to get any easier. 

“I need to get his back too.”

He looked up then, and Richie was glaring at him. Ben held his gaze without wavering, in spite of the heat of Richie’s eyes on his. Rolling Eddie over in a moving car was definitely not going to feel good on his crushed arm, but Ben had heard that people could pass out from intense enough pain, so perhaps they would be lucky enough for that to happen.

“Sh’t fuckin m’rcle,” Eddie mumbled. His eyes were closed, not as though in sleep, but scrunched up in obvious pain. 

“Richie, unless he’s stopped bleeding-”

“Fine!” Richie said. He scrunched up his face too, a mirror of Eddie below him, and he said in a voice so soft Ben could barely recognize it: “Can you brace yourself, Eds? This is gonna suck dick.”

Eddie nodded, once. Ben grabbed his legs and Richie held him by his upper arms, and slowly, painstakingly, they rolled him over, keeping his good arm beneath him as they did. Eddie, for his part, gasped a little, but largely seemed to handle it fine. 

Ben repeated the process of trying to tape things together on his back, hoping that he was at least slowing the flow of blood. He applied gauze to it as well, then unfolded Richie’s jacket and draped it around Eddie’s shoulders before turning him over yet again. 

“What now?” Richie asked. 

The car hit a pothole and shook jarred all of them. Eddie’s already pinched face scrunched tighter still, and Richie made a sympathetic sound of pain. 

“Now,” Ben took off his own jacket, dirty but dry, and spread it over Eddie’s chest. “We keep him as warm and comfortable as we can while putting pressure on the wound until we get to the hospital. How’s that navigation going, Bev?”

Beverly, her knuckles white on the steering wheel, just nodded tersely before responding.

“Good, I think. Maybe? He said ‘downtown’ and that’s downtown, so-!” 

She cut herself off, looked back at Eddie, and made a soft noise of distress. 

“You’re doing great, Beverly,” Ben said. “Just keep your eyes on the road, okay? We’re in a main area so there should be some sort of sign. Watch out for it.”

Beverly nodded, and Ben turned back to Eddie. His eyelids fluttered, then stayed open. Ben smiled at him an expression he hoped was somewhat encouraging.

“You’re gonna be fine,” Ben said. “We’re almost there, I think.”

Eddie made a face, opened his mouth, then closed it again. He whispered something, so low it was inaudible, and Ben leaned in closer to hear it.

“It’s on Witcham street,” Eddie said, then let his eyes fall shut again, like he had just run a marathon.

And oh, what fucking morons they were. Of course Eddie knew where it was. 

“Hey, Bev?” Ben said. She turned with the panic still lit in her eyes, and Ben almost smiled. “It’s on Witcham Street.”

***

Eddie remembered the emergency room in the Derry Home Hospital very clearly, once he got there. He had spent many an evening in this very waiting room, his mother wailing about how someone needed to attend to her Eddie _now _and couldn’t they see how _ill _he was? 

The worst memory here wasn’t even the nearly twelve-hour visit after they got out of Neibolt the second time, the creature’s puke marinating on Eddie’s skin because his mom wouldn’t let him shower first. Nor was it the time he actually did have an ear infection, one so painful that he had been crying into the crook of his elbow and trying not to let his mom see and freak out even more. The worst time had been coming in for his broken arm. His mom screamed and everyone stared and looked disgusted, like he was the baby who couldn’t handle a broken bone when he was being so careful not to make any noise at all. Worse than all that was the thought that he had to go through all this bullshit and he wouldn’t even get to complain to his friends afterward. Eddie didn’t cherish the idea of disobeying his mom, but he didn’t really care what she thought of his friends. She’d never liked them much to begin with. But after the way she’d screamed at them, he doubted whether they’d want to see him. 

He carried that cold iron loneliness in his stomach as a memory, even when he no longer recalled what moment the emotion was attached to. It was the worst trip he’d ever taken to the emergency room of all time, and sometimes it felt like he lived there as a kid. 

As he was rushed in again, he felt an equal and opposite energy. He was actually hurt this time, hurt so badly he thought he could feel the very life draining from him bit by bit, but now his friends were with him. Or, Richie was with him. He had heard Ben and Beverly’s voices until a few seconds ago, but with much slamming of car doors they were gone, and there was only Richie, pulling him in closer again, and a puff of fresh air on his face.

“Almost there,” Richie said, sounding distracted. He huffed, and stood up, sun falling directly on Eddie again. It was interesting to note that, while Richie looked wiry, he was apparently quite strong. Sure, Eddie wasn’t a big guy, but the ability to carry him wasn’t a small feat. Richie shifted his weight, and Eddie rolled into his chest again, careful to keep his right arm tense as he could. Most of the pain was coming from the broken arm by that point, and even that wasn’t as bad as it had been. That was nice, the lack of pain, and Richie sounded worried, so maybe Eddie ought to tell him.

“Doesn’t hurt anymore,” Eddie said, giving Richie an approximation of a smile. What little Eddie could see of Richie’s face, blurred and far off as it was, did not look comforted. He looked pinched and frightened, and Eddie was helpless to try and tell him that everything would be _fine_, really, it was gonna be okay.

“’m not in pain,” Eddie tried again. 

“Not to discourage you, Eds, but I don’t think that’s a good sign,” Richie said. His voice was wet and high, and Eddie let his eyes slide shut again so that he didn’t have to look at his tortured expression. All that he could see through half-closed lids was the smeary chunks of red that he suspected spelled out “Emergency Room.” He knew what this place looked like. It was still the hospital he dreamt of when he dreamed his anxious, bleach-scented dreams of hospitals, needles, blood and bedpans. 

“Richie?” Eddie tried again, but his voice was very weak, and Richie didn’t hear him. Eddie tried saying his name again, but Richie still didn’t respond, so Eddie saved his breath. It’d be easier to tell a joke when they were sitting again, and Richie would be more gracious about letting the mood be lightened if he weren’t exerting himself, probably. 

The command to wait had yet to reach Eddie’s mouth, though, and he mumbled: “Your mom’s gonna be devastated,” into Richie’s chest. Richie made a noise that could have been a laugh, and Eddie let out a deep, heavy breath.

There came the whoosh of the hospital doors opening, and somehow Ben’s jacket slid off his stomach. Cold, climate controlled air hit his blood-slick skin, and Eddie shivered like a spasm. A woman screamed, and Richie said: “My friend, please, he’s hurt, he’s-”

Eddie was laid out on something soft, softer than anything he’d ever felt before, but unnaturally flat. Then he was racing, flying away. He opened his eyes and tried to sit up. 

Everything screamed in protest at his trying to pull himself upwards - the ragged remnants of his muscles, his aching back, his stinging arm and ankle, the crowd of people around him, and Richie in front of him, too far away.

“Richie-!” Eddie tried to call, but his voice was a hoarse and papery whisper, and no one around him seemed to hear him. No one but Richie, who was by all rights too far away to hear him, but who met Eddie’s eyes with the same open-faced panic on his face he had had when Eddie was-

Getting pulled away from his friends was not what he had killed himself for, and Eddie was pissed, but before he could tell the myriad of people in their brightly colored scrubs this, someone shoved him _hard_, and he was flat on his back on the gurney. They were flying again, and someone strapped a mask to his mouth.

_No, that’s okay_, Eddie thought. _I don’t need help breathing anymore_.

But speaking was going to be a difficulty, and he recognized through the haze that they were trying to help him, the doctors and nurses. He told himself it would be okay. This was the end goal, and he’d made it as far as he could get himself. Someone else could worry about keeping him alive for a while.

The only thing that ruined the general peacefulness of the moment was the sound, clear, but growing more distant every second, of Richie shouting his name over and over again.

***

Bev hated deja vu almost as much as she hated to see her friends in pain. It was, therefore, no fun at all to see Richie straining against Ben’s arms, again, and shouting Eddie’s name, again.

“Eddie!” Richie yelled. Ben had both of his elbows and was holding him back, eyes on the floor, like he didn’t want to be there. Beverly couldn’t blame him. She didn’t want to be there either, didn’t want to bear witness to Eddie dying while Richie screamed and pleaded for him _again_. “Eddie!”

“Richie,” Bev said at last. She stepped in front of him, between him and the restricted access hallway he was trying to sprint down. She put her hands on either side of his face and held it, forcing them to keep making eye contact. “Richie, you’re making a scene.”

“I don’t care!” he said. He tried to shoulder past Ben, but Ben held fast, and Beverly pushed lightly on him from the front, moving him back into the waiting room, steering him towards a seat. He struggled less as the moved, a sort of awful clarity getting more and more visible in his eyes. The blind panic was draining from his face and quickly being replaced with comprehension. The situation was still severe, if anything moreso than before. Eddie was hurt, and instead of getting treated immediately he had been waiting, bleeding out, _dying _in the sewer for-

No, he was in the hospital now, and Richie was finally starting to move backward, to sink into Ben’s arms rather than pulling away. They were nearly to the chairs, had nearly sat him down, when Ben made the mistake of speaking up.

“Richie, man, you were right, I’m so sorry we-”

Ben was suddenly cut off by Richie’s elbow crunching into his nose. 

Beverly jumped back at the sound and prepared to stop Richie from running forward, but instead he spun around, turning to face Ben even as Ben cupped his hand around his nose, blood splashing down his face. 

“Richie!” Beverly whispered. Ben’s eyes were wide and his face was turning white, the whole of the waiting room turned to stare at the three of them. She went around to grab Ben and pull him away, but was caught in the fierce intensity of Richie’s glare. She tried not to but couldn’t help it - she cowered. It was instinctive and Richie was so mad, so very very mad and she knew that face so well. She meant to stand in front of Ben and demand what the hell he meant by it, but she couldn’t stand under the weight of his glare, and she stood behind Ben’s shoulder. _Sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m-_

“Richie,” Ben said, the sound of his name coming out pinched through his bloody, covered nose. “R-”

“You made me leave,” Richie said. There was blank fury in his voice, and he repeated “You made me leave!”

The sliding door whooshed open again and Bill and Mike ran in, both of them halting when they saw Richie’s face.

“Is he-?” Bill asked.

“Well, if he does make it, it won’t be any thanks to _you_, will it?!” 

Richie’s voice was still too loud, and as blood dripped from Ben’s face onto the sterile, white linoleum, Beverly thought that she was so sick of blood, so tired of everyone bleeding. If she never saw a drop of blood again, she would be happy. Richie started to raise his hand again, and she thought he was going to hit _her_, that somehow, unfathomably, _Richie _would hit her, but he ran his hand through his hair.

Bill opened his mouth to say Richie’s name as well, but nothing came out of his mouth. He looked empty, sapped of all he had left in him. He sagged down, his eyes falling shut, waiting for Richie to shout as a man would wait for the axe to fall when he waited in the guillotine.

All the fight dropped out of Richie’s body. He slumped, a puppet with his strings cut, and he looked at Bill with pleading eyes. 

“You made me leave him,” Richie said. His eyes were bleary with tears welling up in them. Beverly stepped in front of Ben again. Richie was no longer intimidating, but Richie again. He was Richie and he was crying, again, when Richie didn’t cry. He was Richie who needed her.

“You made me leave him down there!” Richie cried, and he fell then. Bill and Bev caught him before his knees slammed onto the floor. Bill pulled Richie into him and Richie sobbed into Bill’s shirt, shaking against his chest while Bill held him.

“You made me leave him there!” he sobbed, cracked glasses straining against Bill’s chest. “You made me leave him you made me you made me!”

Bill’s shoulders shook as well, and tears were streaming down his cheeks as well. He laid his hands on Richie’s head and held him there, murmuring something so softly that Beverly could not distinguish what he was saying. Whatever he was saying, he said directly to Richie, and it seemed to make Richie cry harder.

“Made me- made me leave him!” he said again, and Beverly finally heard the gruff words Bill kept repeating - a litany of “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Beverly’s heart twisted in her chest. She made to step forward until she caught sight of a woman in scrubs approaching the five of them.

“Excuse me?”

Beverly stood between her and the others, between her and Richie. The woman did not look pleased or impressed.

“Can I help you with anything?” Beverly asked. Polite, unassuming, and with her voice ticking up higher than she spoke naturally. It was not, perhaps, as funny or dramatic as one of Richie’s voices, but it was similarly effective. It turned her into another person, some docile, someone weak. The woman smiled at Beverly, cold and polite.

“We’re going to have to ask your friend to leave, ma’am. He’s causing quite a disturbance.”

Beverly turned and looked pointedly at her friends. Richie was crying softly now, Bill and Mike on either side of him, and none of them made much noise at all. Especially not compared to some of the other people in the ER, moaning through gritted teeth or crying aloud while they held their chests. The show was over, and everyone had gone back to their regularly scheduled emergencies. Beverly turned back to the woman with one raised eyebrow, all her muscles tensed as if ready for yet another fight. 

“He attacked another patient,” the woman said, her false cheer slipping away. She looked tense too, perhaps tense enough to step past Bev and throw Richie outside, which none of them could deal with. Beverly could feel the desperation bubbling up in her.

“Listen, you don’t understand the day we’ve had-!” she began, and stopped talking when she felt a firm, familiar hand on her shoulder. Ben stepped up beside her. His face and chest were streaked with blood, but still he smiled politely.

“Sorry about that. Just a little disagreement between old friends, you understand?” he asked. He had a naturally soothing voice and charming smile, and it seemed that the lady in scrubs was not immune to it. “But we’re talking it through, and we promise we’ll keep it down.”

She didn’t look entirely happy, but she nodded, then walked back up to the desk. Beverly exhaled hugely, realizing as she did that she was shaking, and Ben wrapped his arm around her, carefully, hesitantly. 

“You all right?” he asked in a low voice, and she nodded. 

They managed to coax Richie into one of the hard, plastic chairs lining the wall, where he promptly folded in on himself and stopped talking. Bill was still leaning into him, the two of them surrounded by the others, but somehow grieving alone, separately. Beverly couldn’t decide what she hated more - the way they had sequestered themselves, pulling away from the others, or the fact that they looked so much like they were just mourning Eddie all over again. She wanted to grab both of them by the collars and scream, to tell them that he wasn’t dead, not this time, not

_yet_

anymore, but somehow she couldn’t crack the thick silence that had formed around all of them. 

Well, she thought to herself, she had wanted all of them to stay around for a while longer, to spend just a little bit longer catching up. She supposed, in a way, she’d gotten her wish. And Eddie would even be there, if he-

No, no if. Miracles didn’t get introduced and then ripped out from under you. That wasn’t how magic worked, and in spite of all the evil in the town, Derry made Bev believe in magic. 

Sometime while she waited, she tucked her legs up underneath her in the chair and leaned on Mike’s arm. He was still strong, like all those farm boy muscles from when they were teenagers had never gone away. They five of them sat in a row, Bev on the outside next to Mike, next to Richie, reaching out to no one but leaned on by Bill, who had Ben’s hand on his knee. They acted just like they had when they were kids, all on top of each other and touching for comfort, so long as no one was looking, some other kid who would call Bev a slut and all the boys queers. 

Beverly couldn’t fathom that she’d forgotten how much she missed this. Even in the hospital waiting room, the bleakest place she could imagine that wasn’t in the direct control of IT, she felt more whole than she had for years leading up to Derry. She had her boys. Most of them, anyway. 

She was lost in her own thoughts, practically asleep (and God, when had she last slept? She was so tired, they had to all be so tired) when the woman from the front desk came up to them again. “Lisa,” her name tag said, and Beverly sat up and put her feet on the floor as she cleared her throat.

“You all know the man you brought in?” Lisa asked.

“Yes!” Bev said. “That’s Ed-”

“Eddie?” Lisa asked. She made a face at them, but there was a little amusement in her eyes. Beverly couldn’t see what was so funny about it, but at least they weren’t being glared at anymore. (Just like old times, right, Bev?)

“Edward Kaspbrak,” Bill said. He sounded awful, like his throat had been pulled through a wringer and his nose squashed just like Ben’s, but he looked up with a level gaze. Lisa wrote on her clipboard and nodded, then pulled up a chair in front of the five of them.

“I don’t suppose any of you know his blood type?”

Blood type. Did Beverly know his blood type? It was Eddie, so surely he’d _told _them his blood type, likely several times on the way to Neibolt, likely hundreds of times when they were kids. But she couldn’t remember a thing. Still, she caught sight of Richie staring at the ground, clearly working back up into a panic, and she spoke up anyway.

“I’m not sure, but I guarantee you that if my friend is awake, he knows his own blood type,” Beverly said. 

“Any allergies?” she asked, her eyes never leaving the clipboard.

“Probably everything,” Ben said faintly. She looked up then, and he shrugged. 

“I mean… not that I know of?” Ben said. “Rich?”

“I- I don’t- I don’t know for sure,” Richie said. “Like Ben said. Probably everything you got on tap.”

“We’ll be sure to… take precautions, then,” Lisa said. She looked annoyed again, and Beverly wanted to explain that it was Eddie, the joke was that he thought he was allergic to everything but he really probably wasn’t, but then again, he might be, and it was hard to say because she only remembered she knew him two days ago, but that seemed like an awful lot to explain in the middle of a time-sensitive crisis. 

“Next of kin?” she asked, and all of them froze up. 

“Myra Kaspbrak,” Mike said then. “His wife.”

“And how can we contact her?”

“I don’t… know,” Mike said haltingly. “I’m so sorry, I had her number in my phone, but it hasn’t been working since I- um, I dropped it in a sewer. Sort of.”

Lisa still didn’t look impressed.

“I don’t suppose any of the rest of you have her number either?”

The five of them all shook their heads. Beverly felt a little bit like she was failing a test she hadn’t known she needed to study for. 

“Why do you need next of kin?” Richie asked. “He’s not-”

“He’s going into emergency surgery,” said Lisa, not unkindly. “Even if I were allowed to tell you, there’d be nothing I could say for sure right about now. It’s policy to contact next of kin, a spouse or a mother, if at all possible.”

Richie let out one burst of laughter at that, then slumped back, looking ashen.

“Good news is you’re gonna get both,” he said, still snorting. Beverly turned from him, not wanting to watch him fall apart again. 

“She lives in Manhattan, if that helps?” Mike said. “Or I could go back home and see if I have it written down somewhere?”

“We can take care of it,” Lisa said, in her semblance of kindness. “Sit back, and I’ll let you know what I can. Or, if you prefer, you could all go back home and leave some contact information with me so that I can call you with news.”

Richie must have given the poor woman a look fit to kill when Beverly wasn’t watching, because she shook her head and left without another word, looking mildly alarmed. And then it was the five of them again, back to sitting in silence. Sitting and waiting, waiting with no monster to fight and no race left to win. 

Nothing to do but wait. 

***

Richie didn’t have a lot of experience with hospitals. He never took great pains to make sure he was in good health, but he’d also never been so sick he had to go to the Emergency Room with whatever the dangerous and deadly flu of the year was. When his mom was dying, years ago, his dad mostly took care of carting her to and from the hospital, and the place made Richie feel so out of place that he never visited for more than a few hours. 

He felt guilty about it, later. Her final days, and her son would only come in to say hello and goodbye once a week, like a petulant child. But he didn’t like hospitals. Nobody did. 

In any case, he understood the concept of visiting hours and he knew that, since none of them were legally related to Eddie and they weren’t patients either, they were going to be kicked out eventually, but he didn’t have to like it.

“You can come in as early as nine tomorrow morning,” explained the man who had taken over for the bitchy woman a few hours ago. “But the waiting room here is really only for patients and their companions.”

“And we brought in a patient,” Richie said, fairly certain that he was explaining this whole thing calmly and reasonably, in spite of the pained looks on the faces of his friends. “And I’m not going home until someone tells me how the fuck he’s doing.”

“Sir,” the guy in the scrubs pleaded. The sun had set some time ago, and the room was much less crowded than it had been when he ran Eddie in. Richie’s arms, his shirt, his chest, they were all soaked in blood. He had washed it all off and he was covered in Eddie’s blood _again_.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Ben said. Peacekeeping Ben, who Richie would have to apologize to, eventually, after Ben apologized to him. “We’ll be going now. But you will call, won’t you? If there’s any news at all?”

“We can legally only reveal medical information to Mr. Kaspbrak’s wife,” said the man. Ben gave him a pleading look that he clearly thought Richie couldn’t see, and the man nodded quickly. “But of course, anything we can tell you, we’ll call instantly.”

What fucking ever. Richie wasn’t five, and he wasn’t made of glass, and he sure as shit wasn’t going to cry again in front of everyone today. Not so long as Eddie held out. 

_How could he, though?_ Asked the mean voice in Richie’s head. _He was cold when you left him, bleeding out that whole time, getting dirty and infected and dying just like he always knew he would and you left him to that, left him to swim through sewer water and bleed and aggravate his injuries and suffer and bleed and bleed and bleed-_

“Right,” Richie said. He plastered on a big, fake, smiling for paparazzi grin and said: “Thanks for the help, buddy.”

Then he strode out of the hospital, not looking behind him to see if his friends were following. He knew, by now, that they were. 

There was a long, sullen walk to the parking garage, where someone more fastidious than him had dutifully moved both the cars out of the way. Richie wasn’t even sure anymore who the other car belonged to, but he made straight for his own, even without the keys in hand. Whoever-it-was’ car was full of Eddie’s blood, and Richie wanted his own familiar sports car, the still-there smell of new leather and his overnight bag in the back. He wanted some faint memory of being a big shot in a city far from here with no emotional ties that could make him feel like this. 

His friends seemed to get it. Mike tossed him his keys as they approached the cars, and Bill fell into step with him, automatically assuming they were riding together. Had they always been like this? So tangled, yet efficient? Moving like one massive organism rather than seven? (Six? Five?)

“Meet you back at the Town House,” Richie said aloud to no one in particular, and Ben made a noise of assent. He got in his car, slammed the door shut, and closed his eyes to take in a deep breath. It didn’t have the calming, escapist effect he had hoped for. His nice, shiny car smelled like stale water and dust, and it was too dark and cold in the parking garage to feel like any of the sunny, desert states he liked to drive through at a hundred miles an hour. 

The presence of Bill next to him was the final nail in the coffin for reminding him that he was still here. That this wasn’t the sort of dream you got to wake up from. 

“Can I ask a favor?” Bill said.

“Sure, Bill,” Richie said, making no effort to hide his bone-deep exhaustion. “But I gotta say that I’m not in the mood to go back into that fucking clown’s crack den to, I don’t know, avenge ourselves against the rocks or save the burnt remains of your fuckin’ boat or- what’s so funny?”

Bill had begun laughing, a mildly hysterical sound that startled Richie back into himself, in the dark, dank car.

“I’m sorry,” Bill said. “It’s not funny, I’m sorry. But I was gonna ask you to go back to Neibolt.”

“Are you shitting me right now?” Richie asked. “I don’t think Stan’s playing hide and seek down in the rubble.”

“No,” Bill said. “I left my bike there. Kinda wanna keep it this time.”

Richie looked at Bill’s pale face in the semi-darkness of the parking garage, but he kept a totally straight face. Richie let out one hollow beat of a laugh. 

“Alright,” Richie said. “Yeah, sure. One last rescue. Let’s go save Silver.”

Richie drove back to Neibolt, kicked in the chest by the sudden and visceral memory that he _hated this place_. There was no house left, of course, but Richie hated simply being on the street. He hated the broken down fence, hated the fucking sunflowers that grew in the dust, yellow like rot. He hated the potholes in the street and the empty patch of sky where the evil house once stood. 

But, there was Silver, lying in the road because Bill was forty and still hadn’t learned how to use a kickstand, apparently. Richie had every intention of getting out to go and help Bill get the bike, but he hesitated. So long as the doors were shut, he wasn’t out on Neibolt street, and he wouldn’t even have to breathe in the air around it. And then Bill was out of the car, door hanging open while the dashboard dinged at Richie, and Richie stayed in the car because getting out that late would have been weird. 

Bill walked back, Silver clanking along next to him. God, but that was an absolute wreck of a bike. Richie wasn’t entirely sure how he had gotten it out to Neibolt in the first place. And then Bill tried to wheel the pile of rust into Richie’s car.

“Whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa!” Richie said, hands splayed on the steering wheel. “Nope, no no no, not in the car!”

“You want me to tie it to the back and ride behind you?” Bill asked disparagingly.

“No, I want you to put it in the fucking trunk!” Richie said. “That thing is eighty percent rust.”

“You’re one of those dudes about your car?” Bill asked. “Like, really?”

“Yeah, it’s an expensive fucking car,” Richie said. 

“We’re both rich.”

“Bill can you just fucking- I popped the trunk, okay?”

Bill rolled his eyes in the rearview mirror, but he pulled the bike back out of the car (Richie heaving a huge sigh of relief as he did) and crammed it into the trunk. At least, Richie thought, Bill did not care as much for the integrity of his bike as Richie did for his car. Richie could hear the ding and scrape of the bike as he stuffed it in the back and winced on Silver’s behalf.

Richie drove the two of them back to the Town House in relative silence. Silver was a nice distraction. It was better than endlessly looping the memories he had in his head. Eddie spitting blood onto his face, Eddie stumbling out of the rubble, Eddie trying to choke out Richie’s name as he was wheeled away. 

“They ever get ahold of his wife?” Richie asked, only halting around the last word for a moment. _Wife_. Thinking it in a serious moment made him feel something. He couldn’t say quite what it made him feel, but it certainly made him feel something very strongly, and he didn’t think it made him feel good.

(And oh, Richie wasn’t stupid, but he could keep his thoughts at arm’s length, he could keep his feelings about _that _far away from his feelings about Eddie being alive.)

“I don’t know,” Bill said. “They didn’t tell us, but Mike’s gonna look up her number, give her a call tonight. Figured it would be good if we could talk to her.”

“Oh man, you really want to talk to someone married to _Eddie _about his health?” Richie asked, and Bill laughed. It didn’t sound forced or sad or half-crazed either, and when Richie laughed back, he realized that they were just razzing Eddie. Like this was normal. 

“You know anything about her?” Bill asked. 

Richie hesitated before answering that. After he had seen Eddie again at Jade of the Orient, he had taken every free second to search social media. Predictably, Eddie was terrible at using the internet, but Myra Kaspbrak had a very active Facebook account. She didn’t post about much herself, but she liked to comment on everyone else’s posts. When she did post, she posted about her health issues, Eddie’s health issues, homeopathic treatments, and her own opinions. 

To be frank, Richie didn’t think he would ever be friends with the woman. She seemed like a busybody and a ceaselessly nervous person. She also posted the odd picture of herself, and Richie could not help but notice the similarities between her and the late Sonya Kaspbrak. In spite of all that, she seemed like a decent person. She didn’t seem quite so unkind as the old Mrs. Kaspbrak. She was sympathetic to minorities, in a distant way, and she wasn’t even an anti vaxxer, which was a pleasant surprise to Richie. 

But that was an awful lot to say, and he didn’t especially want to confess how long he’d spent internet-stalking Eddie, so he shrugged noncommittally.

“She definitely looks like Mrs. Kaspbrak,” Richie said, and Bill rolled his eyes. 

They pulled into a space in front of the hotel, and Richie hurried out of the car and across the street. He slammed open the heavy door, making all the Losers already sitting in the front parlor jump.

And all of them were looking directly at Richie, with their big, pitying eyes. Richie closed his eyes and heaved a big sigh. 

“Hey, guys,” Richie said. Was this, he wondered, what alcoholics felt like at their AA meetings when they said their names? He was annoyed, and he hoped it showed.

“Hey, Richie,” Bev said. She had especially wide, pleading eyes, and she stood up, one arm extended, like she was going to go comfort him or something else he didn’t want.

“I’m gonna go to bed,” Richie said before anyone could say anything else to him. His friends looked hesitant, concerned, but what could they say? Going to bed was good for Richie, probably. He didn’t make eye contact with any of them. “Need some beauty sleep to keep up, ya know, all of this.”

“We’ll wake you up if anything happens,” Beverly said. She was speaking softly, like to a wild animal, but the words carried enough weight that Richie’s shoulders sank.

“Thanks,” he said gruffly, and then he ran up the stairs. 

Richie hated this fucking town. He hated the old, musty building they were staying in, hated that Eddie’s room was next door to his, empty but for too much luggage and a lot of blood, presumably. He said he’d been stabbed in his room, and Richie figured the cleaning crew didn’t come every day in a place like this. 

Eddie’s blood was painted all over this godforsaken city.

Richie couldn’t breathe in his room, not when he could only imagine the scent of Eddie’s blood coming through the walls. Eddie who wasn’t dead. Eddie who made it. Eddie, who they’d left alone to drag himself out of the sewers-

Richie went out onto the fire escape again, but he didn’t run down. He sat with his back to the wall and stared out at his hometown, the town he had so willingly forgotten, and didn’t sleep all night long.

They were back at the hospital before visiting hours began. Waiting in front of the big glass doors felt strangely like waiting in line for a rock concert when Richie was in college, lining up down the block to see yet another shitty pop punk band, all of them hoping to be the next Green Day. His stomach was full of the same anxiety, his friends were still surrounding him. Richie felt strangely cold, even though it was a warm, summer day.

The security guard looked annoyed when he opened the doors to them, and Richie wondered vaguely if he’d been rude to him the day before too. He was fairly sure, from the way a lot of workers were staring at him, that Richie hadn’t made many friends at the Derry Home Hospital. 

He slammed his palms down on the front desk and gave the woman working there the best smile he could muster. He knew the smile didn’t reach his eyes, but it was the thought that counted, he thought.

“Hi,” Richie said. “We’re here to see Edward Kaspbrak.”

“He still hasn’t been cleared for visitors, sir,” the woman said. She didn’t even pretend to look at her computer first, and the fake smile on Richie’s face wavered. 

“Can you tell me how he is?” Richie asked. He raised his eyebrows at the woman.

“It’s not hospital policy to release medical information without the permission of the patient, or, if the patient cannot respond, the permission of their next of kin.”

“Can you tell me if he’s _dead_?”

“He is currently a patient, sir.”

Richie was still holding up the painful, forced smile on his face. 

“Tell him we’re here,” Richie said.

She pursed her lips, which Richie suspected meant that Eddie wasn’t able to let in visitors on his own yet. This clearly wasn’t going to be as easy as Richie had hoped, but he was not daunted. This was in part due to the fierce thought that if Eddie had dragged himself out of the sewers for them, Richie could make it into a fucking hospital room for him. It was also partly because the longer he stayed in Derry, the more innocuous things he could recall. One such thing was that Bev was a total agent of chaos when the situation called for it, and this situation absolutely called for it.

So, Richie smiled the friendliest smile he could plaster onto his face (he’d cameoed in a movie or two, but he sure as shit wasn’t an actor) and let the way back to their previous haunt of plastic chairs in a line under the caged TV.

“You’re just giving up?” asked Bill in a disbelieving undertone.

“Fuck no,” Richie said, and didn’t elaborate. “Bev, could I bum a smoke?”

“You still smoke?” Beverly asked. 

“When the situation calls for it,” Richie said. He held his gaze fixedly on her and jerked his head towards the door. “Anyway, my lady, care to speed along the process of lung cancer in all the patients here?” There was a beat of silence, then Beverly’s eyes lit up.

“Lead the way,” she said. She held out a hand to Ben to tell him to stay seated, and the two of them went outside.

The sequestered smoking area really wasn’t all that far from the entrance, but there were trees planted tastefully all around it. This was presumably for the eyes and lungs of the non-smoking public, but it had the added benefit of keeping Richie and Bev well-hidden from the eyes of the hospital staff. Bev lit up as soon as they were concealed and did not offer a cigarette to Richie.

“Do you even smoke?” she asked.

“I vape?” Richie said with a shrug. Beverly gagged, pretending to vomit in the bush. 

“Jesus, Richie. You _would _vape,” Beverly said. Richie was going to ask her what the fuck that was supposed to mean, but she gestured to him impatiently and said “So, what’s the plan?”

“Glad you asked,” Richie said. “Myra Kaspbrak is gonna call and insist that her husband’s loyal and trustworthy friends can go in and see him immediately.”

“Where is he hiding the loyal and trustworthy ones?” Beverly asked, the ghost of a smile on her face. Richie glared at her while she puffed away on her cigarette. A real fucking cigarette choking the air with tobacco right outside a hospital in 2016. For a moment, all he could see was her blood streaked face as she told him Eddie was gone. Lied to him. Made him leave. She had made him leave too, and anger so intense it was painful. He swallowed it down and kept his face level. Bev, who hadn’t noticed any of this sudden emotion, stared at him. “You’re serious.”

“Why would I joke right now?”

“Because you’re Richie,” she said. “Joking’s what you do, all the time, even when it is so not the time to be joking.”

Richie’s heart caught in his chest, stuttering against the top of his ribcage.

“Not now,” he said. “Not about him.”

Beverly surveyed him and let out a long, smoky sigh. Richie noticed, at long last, that it was a nice day outside. Birds chirping and all. He wouldn’t have to notice if Beverly would talk faster, but he was trying not to be annoyed. Trying not to take out his feelings on anyone else.

“She’s gonna know it’s me if I just come right in after the call.”

“She would if you aren’t in there when Mrs. Kaspbrak calls,” Richie said. He held out his phone to her and said: “We’re gonna need to record quite a few phrases to keep up a realistic conversation.”

“What?!”

“Look, it’s so simple. Record some basic shit: hello, goodbye, my husband is very fragile, then go in. I’ll call, play back your voice, then we’re in.”

“That sounds like a really elaborate way to get arrested,” she said. Richie did not lower his phone. Bev kept staring at him pleadingly, but just like he knew she would, she caved. 

“And what do we do when the real Myra shows up?” she asked, but her heart was no longer in the fight.

“Easy,” Richie said. “Eddie takes care of it for us.”

“We don’t even know if he’s conscious, Rich.”

“There’s no flights from New York to Bangor for the next two days,” Richie said. “And I don’t even think she’s heard he’s in the hospital yet. If he’s not conscious two days from now, we’ve got other problems.”

Bev finally dropped the reluctant facade.

“All right,” she said as she grabbed the phone. “How should I sound?” Richie grinned.

It was tricky to finagle the conversation. Richie had to balance the two phones and scroll to the right phrase to say in an instant, holding the phone with recordings up to the other. Luckily, he’d thought ahead far enough to ask Beverly to apologize for the reception, so the hospital worker didn’t find it too out of place. After he hung up, he went back inside, sat down, and waited.

And he waited.

And, when fifteen minutes went by, it did not matter how much effort and thought he had put into his plan. He had to see Eddie _now_, had to see him _yesterday_. He was hurt and alone and hadn’t they already left him alone too long? Richie was up at the front desk, still smiling his awful, fake, toothy grin.

“Me again,” he said to the exhausted woman behind the counter. “What can I do to get you to let me in to see Edward Kaspbrak?”

“Look, sir, you have permission from his wife, but he’s in the ICU,” the woman said. “We really can’t let a group of your size back there.”

Richie ought to have been noble. He should have stuck up for his friends. A part of him was already overwhelmed with guilt at the mere thought of ignoring their plight in favor of his own. But his every ka-thud of his heart seemed to beat out Eddie’s name, and he _had _to see him. He just had to.

“What about just a single person?” he pleaded. The smile he had plastered on his face was gone, and there was nothing but sheer desperation. 

The woman in scrubs opened her mouth to say that it was dangerous, that the infection risk was too high, that really only parents or spouses were supposed to visit while the patient was in ICU, but somehow none of that was what came out of her mouth. Instead she looked long and hard at Richie, then slowly nodded. 

“You’ll have to sign some paperwork,” she said. “And remember that you should be very, very careful. He only just got out of surgery this morning, and we don’t yet know what kinds of complications there may be.”

“Seriously?” Richie asked. He didn’t mean to sound dubious, but he hadn’t expected up until this point that they would ever actually let him go in. The woman simply pushed the papers across the desk to Richie. He felt a warm flash of guilt run through him, but he signed the papers without even glancing at them. The nurse gave him a slightly tired look,but didn’t fight with him. 

“Come with me,” she said. Richie, for his part, turned back with the intention of waving at the Losers and mouthing an apology at them, but then.

He was still upset. He still didn’t remember everything about them. They had still made him leave Eddie down in the cistern. They made him leave.

But they loved Eddie too.

“I’m sorry,” Richie said. He stopped, pained as it made him, and waited there. The threshold to the hall was just in front of him, and Eddie was so fucking close. “I- can we go in one at a time?” 

The woman gave Richie a tired look and Richie, who didn’t have the energy left to try and make funny, just pled to her.

“I know we’re not supposed to,” he said. “But you have to- you have no idea the past few days we’ve had. All seven of us-” 

Richie couldn’t keep going. He felt his eyes stinging in a way that had grown familiar since he got back into town. Richie never used to cry like this. He never cried at all. He was so sick of crying, but Stan was gone, and Eddie was going, and Richie loved them in the sincere, open way he hadn’t loved anyone since he was a kid. He hadn’t cried like this since his mom had died, and somehow this felt worse. Not worse, but fresher. 

Like grieving as a child.

But, by some miracle, the woman seemed to get it. She understood in a way none of the staff had the day previous, and she reached out and squeezed Richie’s arm.

“I’ll do what I can,” she promised. “This way, Mr. Tozier.”

Richie remembered nothing then, of the blurry walk down the hall. He didn’t recall the numbers of the doors they passed by or even what the woman leading him looked like. All that was solid to him rather than a smoky haze of nondescript hospital and the waterfall roar of his blood rushing in his ears was the door opening, and him standing in front of a hospital bed. Standing in front of Eddie, at last.

***

Eddie didn’t wake up all at once. Frankly, he wasn’t sure if he could call it waking up at all. He hadn’t exactly been asleep, for one thing. He was blanketed in the cloying fog of drugs that kept him nowhere at all, wrapped in cotton and separate from the world while still somehow not in the dark otherworld of dreams.

He still felt cold and pain, wherever he was, and he still knew what was happening. He had come to Derry. They had fought IT. He had 

_died_

almost died and crawled out of the destroyed sewers under 29 Neibolt, and he had made it to a hospital, and then he felt a gas mask on his face and the biting of too many needles before numbness began to spin its web around him.

Ah, and Eddie had been waiting for the painkillers for so long, looking forward to them like a midnight premiere. He’d thought they would be more powerful, for all he had craved them and dreamt of them while he was still dragging himself from ITs lair. The pain hurt less sharply, but it was still there, boring into Eddie from his stomach and his hands and his arm and his back, chipping away at him like crumbling stone. It was almost more alarming to be under the influence of pain medication, because now he couldn’t really quantify the pain he was in. He’d grown to associate the loss of sensation with dying, and as drained and empty as he felt, every time his mind slipped deeper into the mist he jolted back as though waking up from a falling dream. Not dying, not dying, not dying.

Time was as hard or harder to quantify than pain. They’d been going, going, going non-stop since they got to Derry, every moment crucial, and now that he was laying still it felt eternal and like blinking, the times between when he was set down on a gurney and when he opened his eyes. 

The first time he could solidly remember looking up, he saw a pair of eyes above his, deep set green in a wrinkled face, sandwiched between a blue cap and a blue mask covering the rest of her face, powdery in Eddie’s dim eyesight. He blinked to try and clear his vision, and the doctor’s brows furrowed. He heard a dim “-five hundred more-” before his hearing was overtaken with low buzzing again. There was a pinch in his arm and the world turned to blue and white smears before fading to black once again. 

The second time he opened his eyes to a new and smeary world of white and cream and beige. A hospital room solidified around him. There was a low, lulling beep of machinery behind his head, and an almost inaudible gurgling noise. He felt pressure in the crook of his arm that he suspected was connected to a bag full of blood. He wanted to turn his head and see it out of some morbid curiosity, but he found that his head was too heavy to move, and in any case, he was very cold, and did not want to disturb the sheets around him and let in more chilled air. He fell back asleep very quickly all on his own, that time.

When he woke a third time, it was as though someone shook him awake. There was a sort of shove at the back of his mind, pushing him through the many pillowy layers of drugged sleep back into waking. Fighting for wakefulness was a bit like tearing his way through a cocoon of cotton, but he was sure, deep down, that he needed to be awake then. 

Eddie’s eyes were heavy as they opened. The room around him was still blurry, but there was a dark shape in front of him rather than the white-on-cream-on-light-on-blue hospital, the pale everything. Eddie blinked thickly a few times in a row, trying to make the image focus. The figure in front of him was tall, and when Eddie squinted through the liquid buzz of his vision, he could see the glint of glasses way up high. 

In spite of how thick and heavy and drugged he felt, the corners of Eddie’s lips pulled up in a tired smile. Richie was standing in front of him, dressed in dark, baggy clothes, looking exhausted, but much cleaner than when Eddie last saw him. Eddie blinked again, and his eyes refocused entirely. Behind the silvery shine of Richie’s glasses it looked like he was crying.

Eddie opened his mouth and pulled at the back of his throat, trying to find the air to just say Richie’s name, to say hello. Nothing came out but an unformed whisper, but Richie seemed to sink into himself all the same.

“Hey,” Eddie managed to say the second try, with great personal effort.

“Hey,” Richie said. His voice was cracked, he swiped at his nose with his sleeve, and then he sniffed. “You look like shit, Eds.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the delay, but here we are!


	4. The New Mrs. K

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A lot of people have a lot of conversations, Richie says very little but tells very much, and a visitor from out of town arrives to see Eddie.

Eddie really did look terrible. Someone had cleaned the worst of the grime from him, but he could definitely use a shower. His fingernails were still ragged and blackened, his hair still greasy and matted. He was mostly clean, probably necessary for all the incisions and stitches, but that just made the dirt that remained stand out against the stark, bleached white of the hospital sheets, the pale hospital gown. His face was gaunt, which didn’t help the overall appearance. The contrast between the shadowy hollows of his cheeks and the ash white of his nose and forehead was stark. They had changed the bandage on the side of his face, that was good. Eddie’s body, where he was wounded, was obscured by a thin hospital sheet, but it looked lumpy around his midsection, as though distended with bandages. 

What took up most of Richie’s field of vision, though, were what looked like dozens of machines. IV bags of pale yellow and cloudy white were plugged into the crooks of Eddie’s arms, along with a viscous red that could only be blood. Something was clipped to his finger, one digital screen measured his heartbeat, and one of the great, silver boxes behind him made a shuddering noise of mechanical breath. 

For all that, though, unpleasant as it all was to see, what Richie saw most was Eddie. Eddie, alive, breathing (even though he needed assistance via the tubes in his nose) and looking up at him with the same, fond look that he’d always had.

“I feel worse than I look,” he just managed to croak out. Richie laughed, suddenly aware that he was choked up, embarrassing himself with tears, and he sniffed loudly. 

“I’ll fuckin’ bet. You got impa-”

Richie choked on the word impaled, tears only falling faster. He tried to stay still but lurched forward anyway, closer to Eddie’s bed, unable to stop himself from crying. _Impaled_, he had been fucking _impaled_, he had-

Richie sank to his knees next to Eddie’s bed, putting them almost at eye level. The room buzzed dully with fluorescents, but there was soft, warm sunlight streaming through the windows too. It was just enough to light Eddie’s face, to bring some color to his cheeks, to make him look like he wasn’t still the waxy corpse Richie had left behind in the sewers. 

“Hey,” Eddie said. His throat was rough; he sounded worse than Richie did, which was an accomplishment. “Are you okay, Richie?”

And then, Richie, who had kind-of, sort-of been holding it together, lost it. He let his head fall to the hospital bed so that he couldn’t see Eddie and didn’t have to hold up the weight of his own head and he sobbed, shoulders shaking the whole bed. He didn’t know he was a noisy crier - he hardly ever cried, so how could he have known that he would do something as humiliating as wail into the sheets? - yet there he was, probably attracting every concerned nurse in the hospital. How could Eddie, barely still alive, ask him if he was okay? How was Richie supposed to stand hearing his name again in Eddie’s voice? Knowing that he was alive, knowing that this wasn’t goodbye? 

When, after a moment, he felt cold fingers running clumsily over his scalp, and he heard Eddie say “Rich, hey, it’s gonna be alright, man,” he only cried harder.

He did eventually look up, the worst of the body-wracking sobs presumably behind him. Eddie looked much more awake then, peering at Richie with wide, anxious eyes.

“What-?” Eddie began, and Richie shook his head, swiped his sleeve across his face again.

“Nothing, man, can we- can we just pretend that didn’t happen?” he pleaded. Eddie nodded slowly, thoughtfully.

“Richie,” he said, his voice hard and serious. “If you want to pretend that didn’t happen, I ought to tell you that I am very, very high right now. I would probably believe whatever you told me right now. If you said the world was ending, or Bill married Mike-”

“Definitely a possibility,” Richie said. Eddie exhaled sharply in a tired approximation of a laugh. 

“Are you okay?” Eddie asked.

“No,” Richie said, laughing hollowly. His knees hurt, but even as he set his hand down on the bed to push himself into a standing position again, Eddie took hold of it, and Richie was overwhelmed with the knowledge that he would kneel there until his knees cracked and dissolved beneath him if it meant he got to keep holding Eddie’s hand, so he did not move. “I mean, not go to a hospital hurt. Not as bad as you are, dude.”

“Told you that shit was dangerous,” Eddie said.

“Yeah, I think we all fucking knew that child-eating clowns that live in the sewers are dangerous, Eds,” Richie said. Eddie snorted again, then winced.

“Whoa, hey-”

“It’s fine,” Eddie said. “Probably fine. Most modern stitches are pretty durable and shouldn’t be torn just by laughing. But it doesn’t hurt to be careful.”

To that, Richie couldn’t think of a single witty retort. He just stared at Eddie, fully aware of how awfully weird it must look to just stare him down this way. But he couldn’t get enough of the sight of him. Eddie, propped up on flat white pillows, the corners of his mouth turned up in a smile. The rise and fall of his chest. The complete awareness in his eyes. Every single sign of life on him was intoxicating. 

Eddie coughed two deep, bone-rattling coughs that made Richie want to vomit hearing, then scrunched up his face in what could have been pain, but Richie knew was frustration. 

“Could you call- er, has anyone called My- My- My-?” Eddie cut himself off with another heavy stream of coughing while Richie gripped his hand too tightly to have been really comforting to Eddie. And, realizing what Eddie was trying to say, he took a deep breath and steeled himself. He knew this going in. He could handle it. It hurt to think about, but Richie was more than grateful Eddie was alive, even if his first thought was of his wife. Why wouldn’t it be?

“Myra?” Richie asked. Her name tasted somehow burnt on his tongue, but he was going to put on a good face if it killed him. To his surprise, Eddie scrunched his face up again and shook his head.

“My GP,” Eddie said. “I usually call him more often and besides, I doubt he’ll ever believe the changes to my medical history if he doesn’t see it in person, so-”

“GP as in General Practitioner? As in doctor?” Richie asked. “Wait, you’ve only been here for, like, three days, how often do you call your doctor?”

“Three days?!” Eddie asked. 

“Not in the hospital, in Derry,” Richie said. “You’ve only been here for, like, a day, don’t freak out.” The words would have had more bite to them were it not for the fact that, not only had Richie not let go of Eddie’s hand, he was now running his thumb over Eddie’s bruised knuckles.

_Eddie will know_, Richie thought to himself, but couldn’t make himself care all that much. Not while they were still touching, not while they were still looking at one another.

“Guess it makessense,” Eddie said, words slurring together. “Richie- Rich- Richie, I’m _so fucking high_,” he announced, then let his head fall back against the pillow, giggling aloud. 

“Jesus Christ, I want whatever you’re having,” Richie said, fully aware that he sounded nothing but fond, and that he was doing nothing but gazing adoringly at Eddie while he giggled, soft and sweet and alive on the bed. 

Oh, how could Richie ever have forgotten how in love he was? Sure, the town took everything when he moved away, Derry stole his memories, but could he have really forgotten feeling like this? Hopeless and helpless and horrified at himself while still feeling like he was riding some impossibly high roller coaster that left him breathless and never, ever stopped? How could he have forgotten Eddie when Eddie made him feel like _this_?

Eddie, for his part, gestured to one of the fluid filled bags with his good arm, only wincing a little as he raised his hand.

“If you’ve got your own venipuncture stuff,” he said.

“My own what?” Richie asked, shaking his head.

“Venipuncture,” Eddie said. “Like, to get a needle into your arm and…”

“Yeah, right,” Richie said. “I think you need that. What, holy shit, how much is in there?”

Eddie shrugged, then winced. 

“I dunno what they did with your jacket,” Eddie said. “Or the clothes I almost died in.” He made a face at Richie, an attempt at a lopsided smile that still looked pretty grim on his injured face. Richie did his best to smile back through the overwhelming tide of emotion. Eddie was going to be fine, probably. He was sitting up and talking and he was making jokes to try and get Richie to smile, but he was so hurt, hurt worse than his mother’s worst nightmares. And Richie had left him there. There was joy and pain and guilt and longing and one emotion that Richie could only clearly define as _Eddie_, the magnetic pull that stemmed from his chest and tugged him always towards Eddie. Richie’s eyes felt thick and watery again as he looked at Eddie’s face then, his unwavering, bloody grin.

_Don’t be stupid_, he pleaded with himself, and summoned up as much bravoda as he could, talking around the thick lump in his throat.

“Don’t they, like, bag up the clothes of all John Doe’s and give them to the homeless?” Richie asked. 

“They what? They don’t do that! And I’m not a John Doe!”

That felt a little better. That rekindled some of the warmth in Richie’s chest, because even gaunt and injured, Eddie could puff himself up. His face was drawn and distressed and his shoulders were tight, and when Richie bit back a smile, it was a real one.

“They totally do that, I saw a documentary about, like, how well-dressed homeless people get their clothes from car crash victims. And you didn’t have your wallet or ID on you when you came in, so-”

“You know my name!” Eddie said, and Jesus, he had to know this was a joke, but whether he was just playing along or simply was too high to know better, Richie was having the best time he’d had since he came back to Derry with this, so he just kept grinning.

“I don’t know, man, this town makes you forget things.”

“Asshole!”

“Maybe, but definitely your favorite,” Richie said. So many questions nagged at him as he looked at Eddie, expression softening again with the dull, drugged haze in his eyes. He looked so tired, so open, so unbearably Eddie. And Richie wanted to know everything. Did Eddie feel betrayed that they hadn’t tried harder to save him? Was he unconscious, or simply incapable of speaking? How had he made it out, and, frankly, how had he held onto Richie’s jacket in the midst of all that climbing? 

_Where did they go from here?_

“Eds,” Richie began, trying to force out just one of his questions out, but his throat caught again. He wanted so badly to stop fucking crying, why did everything today just make him cry? But Eddie, high and exhausted, clearly didn’t notice, and was looking at Richie with a fuzzy sort of focus. Richie swallowed the lump in his throat. “How did you do it?”

He wasn’t sure what sort of response he expected, but he didn’t expect Eddie to smile faintly, let out one gasp of laughter. 

“You’d never believe me,” Eddie said, his voice cracking under strain. He was tired, Richie should let him sleep, and he would, he thought. He would let him sleep just as soon as he found out why he got to keep his Eddie. (_his_)

“Well, I just remembered my whole repressed childhood and bullied a sewer clown to death, so I think my believability is pretty low myself right now,” Richie said. “Try me. I’ll believe anything.”

Eddie’s eyes fluttered closed, and Richie felt a moment of obscene panic, of no, no, no, he wasn’t losing Eddie again, only removed when he saw the shaky rise and fall of Eddie’s chest under a barrage of too many thin blankets. He was okay. He was fine.

“The turtle got me out,” he said. “There was a turtle. It talked with your voice. He told me the way out when it was too dark to see, and it carried me through the sewers on its shell. I thought you were down there with me at first, but the turtle…”

Eddie’s lips moved, but no sound came out. For a moment, Richie thought he had fallen asleep. Then he let out a low sigh, soft and almost musical. 

“...turtle sounded like you.” 

“Why’d the turtle sound like me, Eds?” Richie asked. Now that Eddie’s eyes were closed, he had no reason to bite back his smile. _Eddie, Eddie, Eddie_. 

Eddie murmured something, quiet as insect wings. Richie leaned in closer.

“What was that?” Richie realized he was whispering too, mirroring him without thought.

“Needed to hear someone I trusted.”

Richie let his eyes fall closed as well, and he leaned forward, his head just brushing up against Eddie’s arm, and there he stayed until Eddie’s breathing grew deep and steady with sleep. 

***

Bill made a great deal of effort not to wallow in his guilt. That was the big lesson he was supposed to take away from coming home, right? That it wasn’t his fault if there were monsters in the world, that he couldn’t save everyone? It wasn’t his fault Georgie died, and it wasn’t his fault Eddie died either.

Except.

Except Eddie hadn’t died at all. But Bill _had _left him for dead. 

When the nurse came back with Richie, now smiling and calm, and asked if anyone else wanted to go in, Bill had already told himself he was going to let someone else go. He didn’t deserve to see Eddie, didn’t know what the fuck he was supposed to say to him, how to even begin to apologize. And yet.

Here was a chance to do what he had never been able to with Georgie. To explain himself, to apologize, to get some more fucking time with Eddie and appreciate him while he was still alive. 

Fuck, but Bill didn’t really believe that he was. After everything, how could Eddie possibly still be alive.

So, he meant to politely pass when the nurse came in and said someone else could go see Eddie. He meant to nod to Mike or Bev and sit back, make sure Richie was doing okay. But he couldn’t help the way his head snapped up hopefully, the way he looked at the woman with a wide eyed plea because God, he needed to see that Eddie was really, truly alive. 

“Come right this way,” she said, and as soon as Bill turned to the others - to apologize, to ask them if anyone else wanted to go first - Bev gave him an indulgent sort of smile and jerked her head over towards the door. Ben mouthed the word _Go_ at him, and Mike nodded. Without any other confirmation, Bill followed the woman back into the ICU. 

Bill had written about a lot of ICUs, but he’d never seen one in real life. It was a strange, self-centered thing to think, but it was all he could think of. He was forty and in all his novels he wrote about the stink of bleach, the clatter of metal wheels on linoleum. He couldn’t smell bleach in real life, though there was a pervasive alcohol scent that reminded him of hand sanitizer. He imagined hospitals as very antiseptic places, too, ice white and burningly clean, but there was an underlying scent of sickness here, and the fluorescent lights were somehow yellowish. 

None of this was especially comforting, but it was all interesting, and thinking about how he could improve his writing was infinitely better than thinking about Eddie, hole through his chest, blood dribbling down his face, the way he looked when Bill had seen him last. Better than thinking about how he was the one who made Eddie go down there.

Just like Stan, just like Georgie, all his fault. 

The nurse gestured towards the room without opening the door. Bill was a little floored to be going in on his own, suddenly hit with something like stage fright, but he pushed the door open with as much force as he could muster nonetheless.

There, in the middle bed, lay Eddie. They had only known each other’s faces as adults for a few days, and yet Bill felt he could recognize him in a crowd of millions, like he would recognize any of his friends from Derry. Eddie was hooked up to about a million machines and even with cannulas stuck in his nose, his breathing was labored.

_Not asthma_, Bill thought to himself, a little hysterically. 

He sat down on the edge of Eddie’s bed - there were no chairs in this ICU either, but Bill wasn’t sure if that was a regular thing or just courtesy of regular, Derry hospitality. Either way, he perched on the very foot of the bed, careful not to so much as bump Eddie’s foot. He sat that way, perfectly still in silence but for dripping and beeping and the far off noises of a hospital bustling, for what could have been five minutes or an hour. 

“Hey, Eds,” Bill said at last, his voice rough and cracked. 

He might’ve imagined it, but he thought he saw Eddie’s mouth quirk, just a little, like he was trying to smile but was very, very tired.

“I’m- I’m so sorry, man,” Bill said. Tears he didn’t even know he’d been holding back started to well up in his eyes. “Shit, I didn’t mean to- I guess I can’t say I didn’t mean for anyone to get involved, but I never wanted you to get hurt.”

Eddie mumbled something. His voice was feather light, inaudible over the monitors and IVs hooked up to him. Bill leaned in closer.

“What was that?” he whispered. He didn’t even think Eddie was awake, he had probably just made it up, but-

“I said, ‘No shit,’” Eddie murmured, then sighed. 

Bill began to laugh, and then doubled over with laughter, unable to stop. Yeah, no shit, of course. Eddie definitely smiled that time, and there was no blood stuck in his teeth, and he wasn’t holding onto his own guts, and for as awful as that shitty little hospital was, they were okay. For once, they were okay.

“Same old Eds,” Bill managed at last, just barely holding in more hysterical laughter.

Eddie didn’t respond again. He may have fallen asleep; it was hard to say. Bill squeezed his hand before he left, and went back out into the waiting room, feeling the same relief he had seen on Richie’s face. Eddie was okay. They were all okay.

***

“So, seriously, not to usher in doomsday, but where the hell is Myra?” Richie asked. 

The five of them had taken up residence in the library. No one bothered them upstairs, and while no one seemed to bother them at the inn either, Mike was still paranoid. He still couldn’t bring himself to trust the good people of Derry, not after living there for twenty-seven years without the rest of his friends. He knew the library was safe, his sanctuary, a little spot where no one ever came looking for him.

Of course, he also knew he was being paranoid. The more time passed after It died, the more clearly he realized how much It was in his head. How much It got him to think he was being followed, being hated. There was a lot of racism in Derry, and a lot of folks didn’t like him, but he suspected that it was matched by how much was in his head.

But still, Mike wanted to go home to decompress. He brought his friends into his place (now awake and alive and free enough to feel slightly more embarrassed by the dusty old attic, all of it draped in cobwebs and stacked high with books) and gave them cheap beer, and they sat on the floor because there weren’t enough seats, backs up against piles and piles of books. Richie, a little drunk, had managed to turn the conversation almost immediately back to Eddie.

“Like, someone got ahold of her, right?” he asked.

“I called her last night,” Mike said. “And she’s on her way, but I think Eddie took their car, so it may take a while.”

“God, I can’t even imagine,” Beverly said. “To hear about someone you love going through something like that and then just - just not being able to be there? I can’t even imagine.”

“Mm,” said Richie, drinking deeply.

“Yeah, guess we all have people we ought to call,” Bill said. “I don’t know about you and your husband, Bev, but I haven’t called my wife since I left. She must be freaked out.”

“Has she been calling you?” Beverly asked.

“I wouldn’t know,” Bill said, laughing once. “My phone’s been dead since we went back into Neibolt.”

“Ooh, that’s a phone call I wouldn’t wanna be part of,” Richie said. There was a sour bite to his words, one that Mike couldn’t quite make sense of.

“Who do you need to go call and tell you’re still alive, Rich?” Bill asked. He was a lazy sort of drunk, all soft smiles and easy, good moods. 

“My manager?” Richie said. He popped the top off another bottle, still cagey, still upset over… something. Mike couldn’t put a finger on it, and not just because he had had a few drinks already as well. Richie hadn’t been this moody when they were kids, had he? “Fuck, I mean, actually, I really do need to call my manager. He’s gotta be pissed at me. I ditched mid tour.”

“Even a manager is closer than anybody I need to call,” Ben said. He still had a shy, self-deprecating manner, the same little duck of his head, like he didn’t realize that he was the hot commodity amongst the losers now. “I don’t think I’ve done anything worse than miss a couple meetings, and they can go on without me at all of them.”

“No way!” Bev said, loud and giggly. She all but fell into Ben’s lap with her beer in hand. “Those buildings will fall apart without you, new kid. They’ll all just… crash!”

“Think you may have had one too many,” Ben said, still laughing lightly. 

“What do you think she’s like?” Richie asked. Ben and Beverly were too wrapped up in one another to notice, but Mike and Bill both turned to him. “I mean, what kind of person would Eddie even marry?”

“I… think she should be out here tomorrow. We’ll be able to meet her then,” Mike said. 

“Right, right,” Richie said. “But… I don’t know, I can’t picture it.”

“Just because you two were always at each others’ throats doesn’t mean he’s like that with everyone,” Bill said. “And, I mean, Eddie always overthought stuff. Bet that could make him real romantic. He’d remember every anniversary and all that stuff. I’m really bad at remembering anniversaries.”

“You didn’t happen to miss your anniversary while killing a clown, did you?” Richie asked.

“Nah,” Bill said, then he frowned. “Wait, hold on, did I?”

Mike spat out beer onto the floor, but then Bill shook his head.

“No, I didn’t,” he said, then nodded to himself, as if to say he was sure of it. 

“Christ, man,” Mike said, shaking his head. “You’re making me anxious about this shit, I mean, there’s no way you’re _that _bad-”

“I am, I swear-”

“I mean, she looks like his mom, you don’t think she acts like her too, do you?”

Mike and Bill turned back to Richie, and Mike tried not to look annoyed. He was reveling in success, in freedom, in the idea of a Derry that was no longer cursed and the ability to go live the rest of his life. It made sense for Richie to be worried before they knew how Eddie was doing, and for him to be sad before Eddie came back, but this was getting to be a little much.

“I don’t know, Richie,” Mike said. “I guess we’ll know better when we meet her.”

“Yeah, right,” Richie said. “Isn’t it weird that we haven’t yet? I mean, he’s her husband. You’d think she’d find a way to get out here faster. Maine isn’t that far from New York.”

“Rich, I promise, you can hate her all you want after you’ve actually met her,” Beverly said with a lilting tease in her voice. “What, you jealous some silly girl is gonna come between the Losers?”

Richie laughed, and Mike noticed the color high in his cheeks. They weren’t that drunk, Mike thought. They’d only had a few beers, and Richie still looked milky pale in Jade of the Orient. 

And something in the back of Mike’s head clicked. 

Oh. Richie was- oh.

“He’ll be okay overnight, right? I mean, he’s probably gonna sleep through most of the night. He’s high as shit right now,” Richie said. He finished with a nervous little laugh, trying to sound like he was joking. 

“He’ll be okay, Rich,” Mike said. He stretched out, put a hand on Richie’s hand, and squeezed. Richie looked up, startled as a deer caught in the middle of the road, but Mike just smiled at him as reassuring as he could.

“He’ll be fine?” Richie repeated. 

“Fine,” said Mike.

He remembered their childhoods. Remembered them moving away and forgetting, one by one. He remembered the day Richie showed up at the farm, trying not to cry, because he’d called Eddie in New York and Eddie had forgotten Richie’s name. Mike felt stupid, but how could he have known? He only barely knew gay people existed in 1990. But then. 

He loved him. Was in love with him. 

It was nice, Mike thought vaguely. He felt floaty and cloudy up in the dust and the drink, and he couldn’t form solid thoughts. But he decided it was nice. Maybe tangled, with Myra, and he didn’t know anything about how Eddie felt, but love, Mike thought, wasn’t a bad thing. It couldn’t be, with the open, unselfish way Richie loved, even if he never spoke of it. 

It was a tangled mess, sure, but as Mike looked at Ben and Bev, sitting in each other’s laps and entwining fingers with one another, he also thought that the group of them tended to have a way of working these things out. 

***

Richie was, once again, waiting outside of the hospital like he was lining up for the hottest ticket in town. He had seen Eddie twice the day before, and had eventually called his manager to tell him he would be a little longer before getting back to the tour.

“But _when_, Rich?” he had asked, the high level anxiety clear even over the phone. “You can’t leave me like this, Richie!”

“It’s kinda complicated,” Richie said. “The forseeable future. It’s an emergency, like I told you.”

“What kind of emergency, Rich? What do you want me to tell people? Because right now the public thinks you’ve taken the traditional comedy exit and jumped off a chair with a belt around your neck.”

“Morbid,” Richie said. “And totally out of character. If I was gonna kill myself I’d do something wierd, like that French dude who made a homemade guillotine in his hotel room.”

There had been a moment of silence, and then:

“Jesus, Rich, you’re not gonna, are you?”

“No!” Richie said, fitfully embarrassed that he even thought that was a possibility. “No, I just - I’m with friends. Somebody got hurt, and I really can’t tell you all the details, so make up something colorful.”

“You’re killing me, Rich, you know that?”

“Uh-huh, I gotta go,” Richie said, and he hung up. 

Bill had called his wife at some point and got properly reamed out on the phone. Beverly explained to the rest of them in vague terms that she and her husband were separating, and she grabbed Ben’s hand tight as she said this. Everything was working out fine at home, more or less, and Richie was back to waiting for the important part. He waited to see Eddie again.

And then, when they were in the waiting room, Mike still signing them in, a ghost from Richie’s past stormed through the front doors.

“Where is he?!” shouted Sonia Kaspbrak as she ran towards the front desk. “Where is my Eddie?”

The man at reception was standing behind the desk, palms spread wide, trying to placate her, and Richie blinked. Eddie said his mother had died, so-

“Oh my God,” Richie whispered. Her hair was a bright, unnatural blonde, and her tear-streaked face was softer somehow, less tight, less malicious. She looked familiar, but-

“You must be Mrs. K,” said Richie. He sidled up to her with his most charming smile that was all he could do to keep from bursting out laughing. He wasn’t jealous anymore. This, he decided, was the best day of his life, and none of the other Losers had even come up to try and stop him from running wild with this yet.

“Do you know my Eddie?” she asked. 

“I sure do, Mrs. K,” Richie said. “I’m a- a good friend of Eddie’s. Known him since he was a kid, and I saw him yesterday. He’s gonna be just fine.”

She looked even more familiar when she scrunched up her face, looking like she was trying to decide whether or not she didn’t like him. 

“How did you get to see him? I just got here, wouldn’t-”

“Did you ever get to know his mom?” Richie asked. 

“We met once or twice, why?” she asked.

“No- no reason,” Richie said, barely holding back laughter. “Do you have any cute nicknames for Eddie? His mom used to call him-”

“Hey, Richie, who’re you talking to there?” Beverly asked with a big, wide don’t-you-fucking-dare smile. 

“I’m getting acquainted with the _new Mrs. K_,” Richie said, putting a heavy weight on every word. Bev’s eyes flickered over to Myra, there was a flash of panic on her face, and she forced the fake smile back onto her face. 

“Nice to meet you! I’m Beverly Marsh. You must be Myra?” Beverly said. Myra looked unhappy with her, but she shook Bev’s hand. The man working reception looked deeply grateful when Richie glanced over at him. 

“I’m Eddie’s wife,” she agreed. “How is he? What happened to him?”

And, funny enough, no one had yet asked Richie what happened to Eddie. He looked to Beverly, and she swallowed.

“It’s kind of a long story,” Beverly said. “But what’s important to know is that he’s going to be fine, and he needs a lot of rest.”

“Hey,” Bill said, hands stuck in his pockets as he walked up to them. “Are you Myra Kaspbrak?”

“How many people have you let into see my husband while he’s supposed to be resting?” Myra yelled, whirling around on the receptionist. The receptionist looked frightened, but he clicked on the computer. Richie realized that there was a very good chance he was pulling up a note that said Myra had given them permission, and Richie jumped in to stop it.

“He loves the company, Mrs. K,” Richie said hurriedly. “You must be in a big hurry to go back and see him, right?” 

Richie gave the receptionist a conspiratorial look, and he nodded.

“Yes, Mrs. Kaspbrak, if you’d like to take a seat right over there, we’ll have someone take you back to your husband’s room in just a moment.”

She looked ready to argue, but apparently all of Eddie’s friends were a more formidable force as adults than they were as children. Possibly Myra was less of a forceful person than Sonia, though they looked identical on the outside. Whatever the case, she allowed herself to be led by Bill and Beverly over to the seats, sniffling rather than wailing as she asked whatever had happened to Eddie and did the doctors know all he was allergic to and was he safe being treated here?

Someone was surely coming to fetch Myra any second, as soon as a nurse was free, but Richie couldn’t help but think that he already knew the way to Eddie’s room. Assuming that the door wasn’t locked (and, after all, why would it be?) there was nothing really stopping Richie from just… going right on in. 

He considered for the briefest of moments whether this was a very good idea, then found that he was already power-walking towards the door. It was, he believed, a show of how much he cared for Eddie that he would rather go to him than stay out in the waiting room and poke fun at his wife/mother.

Then he was down the hall and at Eddie’s door, and without pausing to knock, Richie burst through, still holding back giggles from his run-in in the lobby.

Eddie looked much more lucid, then, and he looked up at Richie with unclouded eyes that seemed fully aware.

“Hey, Richie,” he said. “Are you allowed to be back here?”

“Eh,” Richie said. “It’s unclear. I guess we’ll see. How are you feeling, Eddie-Spaghetti?”

“Oh, Jesus, worse now,” Eddie said, rolling his eyes. “Here I hoped you’d forgotten that stupid nickname.”

“Never, Spaghetti-Man,” Richie said. “You even look kinda like spaghetti right now, like, how it gets really pale and limp when you cook it too long?”

“Did you come in here to insult me?” Eddie asked.

“Definitely,” Richie said. “Also, to bring tidings: your wife’s on her way.”

“She’s what?” Eddie asked, sitting up too quickly on his own and pulling the cords taped into his arms taut. Richie held up his hands - and tried to read the wide-eyed expression on Eddie’s face without being too obvious. Had he missed her that much? He hadn’t really mentioned her but he supposed they were married so it stood to reason that Eddie would miss her, and it was stupid for jealousy to start growling like a rabid dog in the pit of Richie’s stomach. Eddie didn’t owe him anything. 

“In the waiting room. Probably coming in at any moment, at which point I’ll really be in trouble. More when she realizes Bev impersonated her to give us visitation rights.”

“You- I’m sorry, you what?” Eddie asked, and in spite of everything, in spite of the fact Eddie was definitely getting pissed at him, Richie’s heart throbbed when he heard Eddie’s voice. He was alive, he was okay, it was all Richie could do not to fall down crying fucking again because he felt okay here, next to Eddie, still breathing. 

“Anyway, if you could talk her down about that, it’d be much appreciated,” Richie said. “I- we just needed to see that you were okay.”

He hadn’t really meant to say something that tender and open, but apparently it had been the right thing to say, because Eddie softened slightly, looking less annoyed than he had a moment ago.

“You haven’t already met M-Myra, have you?” he asked.

“Yeah, Mrs. K and I were starting to get acquainted,” Richie said. He raised his eyebrows and ducked his head, and said: “Ya know, Eds, I was getting really down about being a widower after your mom died, but now I’m starting to see that I may have found a replacement in-”

“Shut the fuck up before I press a call button and tell the nurse that you committed medical forgery,” Eddie said. Richie snorted. He was about to retort when he heard the click of the door beginning to open. There was no real time to run, so Richie threw himself on the bed next to Eddie’s and drew the curtain around himself, praying that Myra wasn’t going to be there for a very long time.

Also, come to think of it, he really hoped that they weren’t going to bring in another patient.

“Oh!” Richie heard the woman say. Even with his glasses on, he could barely see shadows of the Kaspbraks through the curtain, but God, Myra even sounded like Sonia. It was eerie, and he half-expected her to shout at Eddie to send his dirty little friends off somewhere else.

“Oh,” Myra said again, her voice wet and wavering. “Oh, Eddie!”

A soft sound of bodies colliding, the ominous creak of a hospital bed, and a sharp hiss of breath from Eddie.

“Ow, baby, be careful!” he gasped, and the bed creaked again as she stepped back. “Hey, don’t cry, Marty, I’m all right.”

His admonishment was in vain. Myra (the hell kind of nickname was Marty? Richie wondered) was clearly sobbing so hard that she could barely breathe, and Richie thought he saw the shadow of Eddie’s arm as he reached up to squeeze her hand. Another clenching of his tight chest, another icy hot flash of jealousy. _Hold my hand_.

“E-e-e-eddie you’re _hurt_!” she cried. “What happened to you? Why did you come here? How bad is it, Eddie?”

“Not so bad,” Eddie said. He sounded pleading, cajoling, but not meek, the way he had when they were kids. “It’s sore, but I hardly feel it. Lots of pain medications.”

“Too many? Can you still feel all your limbs Eddie they didn’t give you anything you’re allergic too did they you have a very fragile system-?”

“It’s all fine,” Eddie said. His voice was soft and soothing and like nothing Richie had ever heard before. There was a gentleness to him that seemed utterly unfamiliar to Richie. “Marty, sweetie, c’mere.”

His voice got lower, too low for Richie to hear the words, but he could hear the tone. He spoke to her softly, soothing, his voice a balm. He was holding her, and she cried into his chest, loud, wet, whimpering, and Richie’s ribs constricted around his lungs. 

“Eddie, I was so scared!” she cried, voice muffled by his gown.

“I know, sweetie,” he said, still low and soft. His voice was foreign to Richie, who had never, ever heard him like this. “It’s all right, everything’s gonna be all right.”

Richie could feel his heart beating too hard in improbable places like under his fingernails and at the base of his skull. All sorts of memories returned to him, and he always believed when he was a kid that one day Eddie would grow up and get a girlfriend like everyone else, but Richie had never before had to see it. Never had to hear the way Eddie would talk to someone he was in love with. 

Slowly, carefully, Richie peaked out from behind the powder blue curtain. Myra’s face was still buried in Eddie’s chest, and Richie wanted to shout at her, to tell her that he was injured and she shouldn’t disturb the wound, and even as the words rose up in his throat he could hear them, not in his own voice, but in hers. In Sonia’s. Eddie didn’t see him: his eyes were closed, his face pressed to the top of her head, nose buried in her hair. Richie thought, stupidly, that half the fucking reason he had given up on contacts was how much they made his eyes sting and yet even wearing glasses his eyes kept fucking aching and the bitter tears kept welling when he didn’t even fucking cry, not over relationships, not over _boys_.

While they were enveloped in each other, Richie pushed the curtain back and slipped out of bed. He tiptoed out of the room and, when the door had shut behind him, hurried down the hall, schooling his expression before he reached the Losers in the waiting room.

Eddie was alive, and he was thrilled. His heart could burst out of his chest, he was so glad that Eddie had made it.

But it didn’t stop the sting.

***

Eddie missed his inhaler.

Yeah, yeah, he knew he didn’t need it. He had never needed it, and after climbing out of the earth’s crust without it, he had all the proof of that he could ever need, but part of it, aside from calming down panic attacks, had become a comfort thing. Even without clamping it in his mouth and feeling the quick hoosh of artificial air and medicinal slime rolling down his throat, just touching it in his pocket comforted him, calmed him. His New Age coworker, who was legally named Lentil, had a worry stone for this exact purpose. She even gave him one, at a Christmas party at the office. A pale purple stone, polished mirror smooth, that she said would help absorb his anxiety. He accepted politely and threw it away, at the time.

Yes, his inhaler had been a sort of worry stone all those years, so maybe he would need to go down to a self-help sort of bookstore that sold whale song CDs and bundles of sage and buy himself another piece of amethyst, see if it worked better as a replacement. A placebo for his placebo. God, he was obnoxious even to himself. 

Myra had been in his hospital room for four hours straight, most of them crying and saying how _worried _she had been, how _scared _she was, and how _awful_ this whole situation was. And she didn’t even know the half of it. She had asked him several times how he had been injured, but every time he managed to deflect but describing some other symptom or medication he had, which Myra was always deeply interested in. 

At long, long last, he got her out of the room by feigning a need for a sweatshirt, something warmer than the hospital gown, and she could find it packed away in his room at the Derry Town Home. He was sort of cold, but he missed the others, missed his friends, missed the people who knew him not as a sick, weak man with a short temper that was funny for its weakness, but as another kid. As a hero. As someone… brave.

She told him he’d be back so soon, and he mentioned in a would-be casual voice that he might be visiting with friends while she was out. She frowned at him.

“Like that Richie Tozier fellow? The comedian?” she asked. “I met him in the lobby, and you didn’t tell me that you knew him.”

“Guess it must’ve slipped my mind,” said Eddie. “Don’t worry about a thing, Marty. You’ll like them. They’re great people, the reason I’m here.” In a roundabout way, at any rate. 

She looked dubious, but gave him a damp kiss on his forehead before hurrying out. 

The moment the door had clicked shut behind her, he said: “Richie?” He suspected that Richie had snuck out (somehow) at some point earlier, just because he’d never known Richie able to sit still for more than five minutes, much less four hours. 

No one responded, in any case, so Eddie gave up and pressed the call button. It wasn’t as though he could reach over and open the curtain for himself. He had a very limited range of motion, and even if he could stand up, he wasn’t sure he could raise either of his arms that high. 

“Are you all right, Mr. Kaspbrak?” the nurse asked. He was nervous looking, young, and by the way he was glancing at Eddie’s bandages, probably was worried that it was something the matter with Eddie’s injuries. 

“Fine,” Eddie said, which was only sort of true. He ached everywhere, deeper than any pain medication could reach, but he didn’t want to mention that or deal with it just then. He had lived through worse, at this point, though he noted idly that it was probably the first time ever he’d said he was fine when, physically, he wasn’t fine at all. “I just wondered if you could bring my friends in from the lobby.”

The nurse bent at an awkward angle to look at the chart clipped to Eddie’s bed, then made another nervous face at him, anxious energy positively radiating from him.

“It, uh, doesn’t really look like you’re cleared for multiple visitors?” he said. “You’re still in a pretty early stage of recovery and-”

“I am very fuck- very aware of my injuries, I promise,” Eddie said. “But having five people in my room is not going to make a difference in my healing, I’m absofuckinglutely sure of it.” So much for not swearing. The nurse looked more harried than ever, but he nodded and walked out of Eddie’s room, much to his relief. In the interim, Eddie stared at the ceiling tiles and let his mind drift.

Mostly, he was hazy and in pain, with a slight itchy feeling that he assumed was _healing_. He’d never had to heal from anything worse than a broken arm before, but that had a similar sort of itchy heat as his bone stitched itself back together. He felt a hollow sort of ache in his chest that he realized was _missing_, missing Richie, missing his friends, missing the comforts of home, like solid food and real clothes. He even missed Myra, though a few minutes after she arrived he felt satisfied again and realized he could do without her.

Oh, there was the Myra problem. 

The problem? He loved her, he missed her, when she cried he wanted to see her happy and well again. It didn’t make him afraid or filled with dread, like his mother’s tears had. (And even if he wouldn’t admit to himself that he knew why he _did _oh he absolutely knew the difference that as much as he had married his mother he had married the kind version of her, the loving version of her, the version of her that hadn’t rotted and darkened and turned vindictive under the shadow of Derry.) But as he had held her and hushed her and told her that it wasn’t that bad, really, and some of those tattoos she always hated would be all gone now, come on Marty, give us a smile, he was slowly coming to the crushing realization that he wasn’t in love with her. Seeing her filled him with fondness, with the same sense of being served a warm meal on a cold day. She was his wife and he loved her very much.

But being with her just wasn’t the same as-

“Ho-ly shit, dude,” Richie said. “Your wife.”

“What’s so fucking funny, asshole?” Eddie asked, and made an effort not to wince. Talking too loudly or too fast shook the casings wrapped around his ribs, his stomach, even his arms and legs. Every vibration set off a chain reaction of bad through his whole body, and so he tried to lay still.

“Nothing,” said Ben, glaring at Richie. Ben, still just as sweet and sensitive as he was when he was a kid. Ben, fingers entwined with Beverly’s. Eddie smiled faintly. About fucking time. 

“No, go ahead,” Eddie said. He sounded combative, as was his way, but he felt defeated. “You can say that she looks familiar.”

“Well,” Beverly began, an embarrassed half-smile on her face.

“You married your fucking mom, dude,” Richie said. “That’s weird as shit.”

“Beep-beep,” Bill said, utterly flat-faced. “She seems, ah-”

“Well, I’d say one of a kind, but-!” Richie was half cut off by his own laughter, and half by Beverly’s elbow jammed between his ribs.

“How are you feeling?” Beverly asked. Eddie, to his immense credit, didn’t even laugh at her.

“I’ve felt better,” he said. “I almost died… yesterday?”

“Day before yesterday,” Beverly corrected. She had softened with age, grown sweet and rounded where as a kid she had been all sharp edges. Eddie thought, for a moment, she had gotten girlier, but no, he realized, that wasn’t it. They’d all gotten softer. Weaker, maybe, but also kinder. 

“Right, well I almost died a couple days ago,” Eddie said. “And I’m still really cold and really high.”

“Cold?” Mike asked. 

Eddie shrugged, and immediately regretted doing so as pain like shards of ice stabbed from his shoulder blades down. 

“I’m still getting pumped with blood fresh from the fridge,” he said. “Chilly blood.”

Richie snorted, a little kid laugh, and Bill rolled his eyes, elbowing him as well. Eddie didn’t want to say it out loud and jinx it, but it felt nice. As nice as initially reuniting at the restaurant. 

“And I’m gonna look like shit when I get out of here,” Eddie realized aloud, feeling his face fall in dismay like his muscles were all reacting in slow motion.

“You look like shit right now, dude,” Richie told him.

“Dude!” Ben said.

“What? Eddie, you know you look like you got flattened by a fucking Mack truck, don’t you?”

“Beep-beep,” Eddie said sourly. “I meant, like, my chest, my stomach.”

“You’ll have some kick-ass scars,” Richie said. 

“I’m not going to have any stomach muscles when I get out of here,” Eddie said.

“You weren’t exactly Ben when you got in,” Richie said.

“Dude!” Ben cried again.

“What? I don’t either, I’m just saying both of us have the muscle definition of cooked pasta.”

“I have a personal trainer at home,” Eddie said. He wasn’t really stung, because it was Richie, but he was excited for the chance to prove him wrong. “I work out; it’s part of a healthy lifestyle.”

“Does the new Mrs. K let you out of the house for something that dangerous?” he asked.

“Richie, if you don’t behave, we’re putting you in time-out,” Beverly said. He gave her an impish grin until she shook her head as if to say she wasn’t really angry with him, because he was Richie, and they all had different rules for him. They were all there, all okay, and something deep in the pit of Eddie’s ruined stomach loosened minutely. 

Then, a flash of cold again. No, they weren’t all there. They never really would be again.

“Has anyone talked to Patty?” he asked. He had been talking so much all day that his ragged throat was getting dry and sandy from overuse, but this was important. His friends sobered up all at once, and Richie seemed to draw into himself, replaced with a gray and quiet exterior that had little to do with the real him.

“Not really,” Mike said. “I checked the obituary, and there’s a funeral service this weekend. We thought about checking in, but…”

“But it’s not as though any of us actually know her,” Eddie said. “Yeah, I get it.” He was quiet for a moment. They finally had a minute to breathe, and the grief hit Eddie fresh. He hadn’t known Stan as an adult, but they were best friends when they were kids. Closer than close. Stan had snuck into his house after Eddie broke his arm to hang out with him and give him books, and Eddie had given him a late Bar Mitzvah present, which Stan told him was thoughtful but clearly hated. They hung back together and talked while Bill and Richie plunged headlong into whatever danger they could find. And now, suddenly, he was just gone. 

Stupid, to be this upset. Eddie hadn’t spoken to him in years. He hadn’t _remembered _him in years. But his relatively undamaged chest ached nevertheless. 

Eddie opened his mouth to say something - to remember Stan, to suggest sending flowers to Patty, he wasn’t sure, but all that came from him was a deep, dry, racking cough. The wound in his stomach splintered and sent shots of pain through him as he bent forward, gasping for breath that wasn’t so dry and jagged as everything in his throat. He gripped at the edges of his bed with cold, frail hands, only to discover that his grip was too weak to do more than paw at the mattress before sliding away. Eddie coughed until his vision went gray and the only color he could see was a mist of red on his pale, blanket-covered lap. 

Then someone was shouting and Eddie didn’t even have the breath to tell them that he was fine, guys, really, he didn’t feel any worse than usual. 

The other Losers grew fuzzy in his vision, and Eddie, once again, thought about how much he missed his inhaler. 

***

“We have told you before, Mr. Tozier,” the front desk woman said. “We cannot reveal personal medical information about our patients to you without the express permission of either the patient or his next of kin. And since Mr. Kaspbrak is currently sedated-”

“I’ve been in his room all fucking-”

“Thank you,” Ben said quickly. “We’ll just wait out here, then.”

He pulled Richie back to the chairs by his elbow. To Richie’s credit, he let himself be dragged away this time, probably because Eddie was going to be okay. Ben couldn’t say how he knew it wasn’t a danger this time, but he knew, and he thought Richie did too. 

There was more than a little bit of irony to the fact that, after so many years of Eddie thinking he was fragile, now that he proved he hadn’t been, he actually was. Laughing too hard or talking too loud could shake something loose inside of him and hurt him and then… 

Ben wasn’t too scared. Eddie looked lucid and a little embarrassed when the rest of them were ushered from the room. He knew that blood getting coughed up was usually a sign of dying or a bad movie about a pretty girl dying from tuberculosis, but even so. 

What worried Ben more was the look on Richie’s face. He supposed that made sense too. The last time Eddie had been coughing up blood hadn’t been a great experience. 

Frankly, it was fucked up that Ben could point to a last time Eddie had been coughing up blood. How often did people cough up blood in their life? Not very, Ben suspected. 

His thoughts were all disjointed and tired. It was hard to stay focused, because as much as he liked to think that they were, at long last, out of the woods, they now had Eddie’s life to worry about in a longer, more drawn out way. Unlike with Pennywise, there was nothing to fight and no monster to kill. All they could do was sit in the hospital waiting room and try not to start resenting each other. 

Not that Ben harbored any resentment towards anyone. Or, if he did, it was minute. Bill might have gotten them into this mess in the first place, but because of him they were saving countless lives, they had made Derry a habitable town. Mike had brought them back without telling them that the plan he had so meticulously thought out had been proven not to work, but again, all was well that ended well, Ben supposed. He got to see Beverly again, got to tell Beverly who he was with her even remembering this time. If they hadn’t gone through hell, Ben would never be allowed to sit there under the fluorescents and hold her soft hand in his, still feeling a thrill of disbelief at his good luck whenever she ran her thumb over his knuckles. Sure, Richie had punched him so hard that his nose still throbbed, but Richie was worried, he was upset, and Ben had dragged him out of Neibolt (to save his life) so that was fine. 

And if it wasn’t entirely fine, they could deal with that later.

Richie’s mood didn’t improve at all when Myra came back, thick sweater folded up under her arm, and was immediately let back to see Eddie.

“Come the fuck on,” Richie said. “So he’s well enough to see her but you can’t even tell us how he’s doing?”

“Hospital policy, Mr. Tozier,” said the receptionist, not looking up from their paperback. 

“I’m sure he’ll send for us when he’s awake,” Beverly said soothingly. 

No one was asking the key question, Ben thought, though he felt mean for even thinking it: why was Richie so intense about this? Sure, he’d always had a temper, and he and Eddie had always been close, but he hadn’t been a volatile kid. At Jade of the Orient, he’d seemed downright easygoing.

Ben supposed that people changed when they got older. But then, he also thought that perhaps Richie had always been intense when it came to his friends. He had his blowout fight with Bill because Eddie was hurt. He’d come back when he heard Bev was in danger. Maybe he was so loyal that it worked to his own detriment.

Ben was broken out of his thoughts by Bev, leaning on his arm and whispering in his ear. 

“How long do you wanna stay here?”

It was so quiet that Ben could have misheard her, though he knew he hadn’t. From her low voice, the question was only for him, though that in itself opened up all kinds of other questions. Were they going together, when they went? Where were they going? Did Beverly have to do anything more formal to be rid of her husband? What were they?

These were all questions that might have been (ought to have been!) asked earlier, but then Eddie had been alive and there was one emergency after another, every moment free spent with the group or asleep. Ben was still so tired, and he hadn’t been able to get more than a minute alone with Beverly. It would’ve been worse if he hadn’t spent his whole life waiting to get a minute alone with Beverly. As it was, he was used to the sensation. 

He wanted to ask her all these things and more, but first, he thought the answer to her question was obvious.

“Until Eddie’s all clear,” he murmured back. “Outpatient and on the mend, I guess. If you don’t wanna stay in Derry that long-”

“No, you’re right,” Beverly said. “We ought to stay at least that long. I’m just kind of wracking up a bill at the hotel, and I don’t know when Tom- I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to afford it.”

Oh, Ben hadn’t heard Beverly say a word against him, but he did not like Tom at all. If Bev had left Derry with Bill, he would have been - well, not happy exactly, but happy was the best word he could think for it. He would have been glad that Beverly was happy, and he would’ve cherished the fact that she was happy, somewhere. He would’ve been broken hearted, but happy nonetheless. But Tom, Ben could tell, was absolutely nothing like Bill.

“I can take care of it for you,” Ben said at once, and then cringed. Did he sound weird? He probably sounded weird, some sort of overbearing sugar-daddy with his ‘Don’t worry’s and his ‘I’ll handle it, darling’s. Beverly could take care of herself, Ben wasn’t stupid. But he also didn’t want her to worry needlessly. He wanted to take care of her, if he could. “Or, I mean, I’m sure we could find someplace cheaper? If it looks like Eddie’s going to be here a while we could all split up a long term AirB&B? That’s what I do on, you know, long projects,” Ben finished lamely. To his relief, Bev was still smiling at him, that fond, loving smile that made him feel like the sun was shining down on him and him alone. 

“That would be really nice,” Beverly said. She squeezed Ben’s hand, and for a moment Ben thought his heart would just stop right then and there. She leaned over his lap to the other guys. “You guys wanna move out of the creepy little hotel and into a house for a bit? Ben and I were gonna stay at least until Eddie gets out of the hospital.”

“Obviously,” Richie said. “Did you guys have anything you needed to get to?”

“My career is already in shambles,” Bill said. “And I wouldn’t be going anywhere anyway.”

“I live here,” Mike laughed when they turned to him. “Hopefully not for long, but I live here now. I’m not going anywhere.”

“You have to get back to work, Mikey?” Bill asked. 

“Actually the library is closed to the public right now,” Mikey said. “No work while they deal with the crime scene.”

“Oh, shit,” Ben said. “Richie, are your prints still on the murder weapon?”

“Fuck,” Richie said. He was staring straight forward, his eyebrows scrunched up. “Presumably. Am I gonna get charged for murder?”

“I don’t think so,” Mike said. “This town always has a way of covering these things up.”

“Yeah, but if the curse is broken, then it won’t be doing that anymore, right?” Richie said. “I don’t really have the time to get charged for murder right now. My career’s already in hot water.”

“We’ll all give you an alibi,” Ben said. “For whatever our word is worth.”

“That’d be a news story,” Beverly said with a laugh. “_Famous Author Bill Denbrough Insists Richie Tozier Not Guilty_, could you imagine?”

All of them laughed a little harder than the joke really warranted, because they were still edgy, still nervous and still waiting to hear that Eddie was okay again. Bill and Mike eventually went off to get food, though Ben wasn’t sure they intended to get anything. He hadn’t seen so much as a vending machine since they got into the hospital, but he guessed Mike knew the place better than he did. Then Beverly got up to use the bathroom, and there was only Richie sitting next to Ben, sullen and silent. 

What Ben meant to say was “I’m sorry.” What came out of his mouth then, was:

“I was only trying to save you.”

Richie glared at him. He still looked tired, and something in the back of his eyes was deep down sad in a way that Eddie living hadn’t managed to change. 

“If you want me to apologize, I’ve been told on good authority that I’m an asshole. I promise, it’s not gonna happen.”

“Right,” Ben said. He meant to let it drop, but he turned all the way in his seat to face Richie. “Look, we were trying to save you. I’m sorry we left Eddie, okay. I’m sorry, and it sucked. More than sucked! I can’t tell you how fucking bad I feel that we just left him there. But he lived, and we can’t undo it. And down there, his eyes were open and glazed and he wasn’t moving, whereas we knew you were alive. The place was coming down, Rich. We had to do something.”

Ben thought for a moment that Richie wasn’t going to say anything. He worried, just for a second, that Richie would punch him again and leave. But instead, Riche sighed and hunched over. For a guy over six feet tall, he looked very small. 

“We shouldn’t have left him at all,” Richie said. “Even if he was dead. We shouldn’t have left him down there.”

“Rich, we didn’t know if we could make it out alive,” Ben said, pleading. “None of us would want the others to die trying to get our body somewhere better.”

“Speak for yourself,” Richie said. “You guys leave my body in a sewer and I’ll haunt all your asses for eternity.”

Ben smiled at him, but it wasn’t all that funny. 

“The fact that he’s okay isn’t the point,” Richie said. “The point is that we never should have left him in the first place.”

“Richie, if he was dead-”

“Would you have left Beverly?”

Ben didn’t process what Richie said for a moment.

“If she had been dead? What’s that got to do with anything? I already said that any of us-”

“Okay, but I’m not talking about any of us, Ben,” Richie said. Hie knuckles were white. Then he looked up at Ben. The look in his eyes was piercing, heavy, suffering, and more than anything, he looked like he was pleading for Ben to understanding. “I’m asking you if _you_ would have left _Bev_. Even if you thought she was dead, how would you feel if we dragged you out?”

Ben blinked at Richie, trying to get whatever Richie wanted him to get. Then, all at once, Ben understood.

“Wait, you-?”

“Either of you guys like gummy bears?” Bill asked. He had an arm full of plastic wrapped snacks and an amused expression on his face. “The machine spat out seven bags, so-”

“Sounds great, Big Bill,” Richie said. He ripped a bag open with his teeth and dumped half the bag in his mouth.

He looked up again at Ben five minutes later, when Ben had been nearly convinced that Richie was never going to look at him again. His face was wide open, a wordless question. Did Ben get it?

Yeah, Ben got it. 

And, as Myra walked out into the waiting room and started at the sight of them, as she said “Oh, good you’re all still here,” in a voice that only sounded a little sarcastic and invited them back into Eddie’s room again, Ben watched Richie watch her. He watched the way that Richie, the rich, successful comedian, who had everything in the world, looked at Myra Kaspbrak of all people with what was unmistakably envy. 

Ben understood all of it.

***

Eddie decided that he didn’t especially like having Myra and the Losers all in the same room. They were, for the most part, all being polite. Even Richie was keeping himself toned down around Myra, possibly because he didn’t want Eddie to get hurt again, more likely because Beverly had given him a very firm talking to. Eddie would have to thank her when he felt a little more lucid. 

As it was, Eddie was very out of it. He was back to normal - his new normal, anyway, the normal wherein he felt fifty percent drug induced haze and fifty percent dull pain running in hot tendrils up and down his torso from the center of his pain, the still healing hole in his stomach. And he tried not to be completely and totally mortified by the presence of his wife.

“...already have such a _nervous _digestive system and what are you supposed to do now! Oh, Eddie, you can’t even eat like this! You know you need a _very _high protein diet to function properly and to counteract your vitamin K deficiency!”

“I know an easy way for Eddie to get a high-protein diet. All liquid, too,” Richie said. 

“Richie!” Bev whispered, and hit him, and when Richie wasn’t looking, Eddie laughed into his shoulder.

“You know a good protein shake?” Myra asked.

“Something a little more all-natural,” Richie said, and Eddie bit his lip so hard he thought he might break his skin with his teeth. He was not going to let Richie see how much this cracked him up. He wasn’t.

“Oh, Eddie, we’ll find specialists all over the country if we have to! I called your dietitian this morning, and she said…”

Myra kept talked, but her voice faded out almost instantly. Against his better judgement, Eddie caught Richie’s eye. Richie smiled at him, a softer, gentler smile than Eddie was used to. Eddie grinned back at him, and decided this wasn’t really all that bad. Embarrassing, yes, but not quite like his mom. And, better yet, Richie was there.

Eddie’s empty, ragged stomach flipped while he held Richie’s gaze, feeling the unspoken warmth radiating between the two of them. Eddie felt safe, he felt happy, and he knew all at once that it was because Richie was there. 

But that, he realized soon after, might be a complication of its own.


	5. But He Lived Well Enough

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of hospitals and happy endings.

Richie took up residence in the Derry Home Hospital, or near enough did so. While Bill, Ben, and Bev were all back to working from “home,” sending in designs or manuscripts to agents and editors far, far away from Derry, Richie waited in the hospital. While Mike packed up his little apartment, Richie sat next to Eddie’s bed. When, after a few days of cajoling, Eddie talked Myra into going back home and back to work rather than stressing herself out in Derry, Richie was still there. 

After a week, they had a sort of routine. Richie went to visit in the mornings, throwing wadded up napkins at Eddie and teasing him about how sexy he probably thought his abs had been, should’ve just not worked out in the first place, like Richie, then there would be nothing to lose. He would lament the tragic loss of his one true love, the original Mrs. K, and plot how he would go about stealing the new Mrs. K from Eddie. Eddie would call him a dick, and Richie would order both of them hospital food (Jell-O and a variety of broth for Eddie, normal, solid food for Richie.)

Mornings were the times in which Richie got to know Eddie: not the little kid with undiagnosed anxiety, but the grown up. Eddie who, rather than spouting off all the dangerous ways to die in a car accident, absolutely loved cars, and could tell Richie exactly how to take his shiny sports car apart and put it back together faster than before. Grown up Eddie had an irrational fear of dying of the topical flu of the season, and he went to get several flu shots each October, just in case. Grown up Eddie wasn’t quite so quick to laugh as kid Eddie, but Richie figured that this at least was for the best for the time being, as if he laughed too hard he would rip out the stitches holding his stomach together.

Grown up Eddie wasn’t mad about the whole “left for dead in the sewers,” thing (he gave them all hell about it when he was awake enough to do so, but he didn’t mean it seriously), but-

“If I tell you what I think, you’ll think I’m insane,” Eddie said.

“I already know you’re insane, Eds,” Richie said. “What’s the deal?”

“I wonder,” Eddie said, then winced. “I mean, yeah, I think you should’ve checked my fucking pulse first, but sometimes I wonder if the others were wrong.”

“What do you mean?” asked Richie, already sure he knew what Eddie meant but hoping he did not.  
“Sometimes I wonder if I- sometimes I wonder if I _was _dead,” Eddie said. 

But he only said it once, and Richie had no desire to ever bring it up again.

They talked, and sometimes Eddie just lay there with his eyes closed, breathing deeply because it hurt too much to keep talking, strained his stomach in ways that he couldn’t sustain. They would sit in silence, sometimes, or more often Richie would talk about anything or everything while Eddie lay there and listened. It was strange, talking so long without telling jokes, because he didn’t want to make Eddie laugh too hard. He wasn’t used to talking seriously, but if Richie could do anything, it was talk. 

He mostly talked about all the time they’d missed. How he’d moved out to Chicago after dropping out of college, too scattered to stay focused all the time. How he’d then tried out for (and, miraculously, made it into) Second City. He was the only person there that had never been in an improv group before, not even a crappy one in college. But he did well there. He couldn’t rehash any of the funnier stories, such as the time he accidentally told one of the head writers for SNL that his skits were the most boring shit on television, then was hired on by that same man. But he talked, to his own dismay, about his feelings. How terrifying it was to audition, how either before or after most auditions he threw up. 

(And once, when he thought Eddie was asleep, Richie even told him how much it hurt when his manager suggested he just use scripts other people had written. “It’s burning you out, Rich,” he had said. “Writing while you’re on the road. Let someone else worry about the hard part and you just go be funny on stage.” Richie was already a name by then, and he was told in kind, sugar-coated terms that it was that name, that brand recognition that drew people in, not the jokes Richie wrote. (And, when Eddie turned out to not be asleep for that confession after all, but he tactfully did nothing more than give Richie a kind smile.))

In the afternoons, the rest of the Losers came in. They hung out in Eddie’s room, generally being a nuisance to the doctors and nurses by taking up all the space in the room. Eddie had been, thankfully, moved out of the ICU and into a quiet, less adamantly guarded residential wing, but even then there was a bit of a song and dance to get five visitors, none of whom were related to Eddie, packed around his bed. 

Eddie was over-the-top happy for Ben and Bev. Richie knew for a fact that Eddie had offered Beverly the number of his personal lawyer if she needed any help ruining her soon to be ex-husband’s life and squeezing every last penny from his worthless fucking balls. (Eddie’s words.) He loved catching up with Bill, the two of them who had been best friends for as long as Richie had known either of them. Mike had worried about the cost of the hospital stay out loud, and in response Eddie had laughed a disbelieving laugh. 

“Trust me, Mikey,” Eddie said. “I have a very good insurance policy.”

Richie was a little bit shocked to realize that Eddie’s boring job had left him absolutely loaded, too, and he really wasn’t lying when he said he wasn’t worried, not even remotely, about the extended stay in the hospital. It left him even more curious as to why, then, Myra wasn’t staying there. Richie was torn. On the one hand, he couldn’t fathom how Myra could leave when her husband, Eddie, was still bed ridden, still the color of death warmed over. It disgusted him by proxy because he could never leave Eddie like this, not ever.

(_Again_.)

On the other hand, he didn’t especially want Myra hanging around. He liked having his mornings alone with Eddie, drinking filmy coffee choked with cream and sugar and talking on and on and on about anything and everything. 

And, though he complained constantly, Eddie seemed to like having Richie around all the time, too. It was subtle, the way his face lifted when Richie walked in the room, and the way he squeezed Richie’s hand when he wasn’t really thinking about it, but Richie noticed. He supposed he noticed everything about Eddie. Once this was all over, he guessed they’d go right on back to being best friends. BFFs. 

It only made Richie deeply nauseous to think about, but nausea was always better than the horrible emptiness that had encroached on him when he thought that Eddie was gone.

The part that they never talked about was the present. The past and future were fine, but no one talked about what it was like after going into the sewers again. If Richie clutched Eddie’s hand a little tighter after another awful nightmare, another night waking up soaked in sweat that felt like someone else’s blood and screaming Eddie’s name into the quiet of the house they were renting, Eddie didn’t mention it. Richie didn’t know if he had dreams too, or if he did, what they were about, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. What sort of awful nightmares afflicted people who had died and come back?

Richie replaced his glasses a few days in, because the crack in his old pair always made him flinch. He bought new clothes and burned the ones he’d worn into the sewer. Twice he badgered Bill to stay up all night with him, and did the same with Mike, still afraid to fall asleep, and one particularly pathetic night, he simply snuck into Ben and Bev’s room and slept on the floor, only able to calm down when he could hear their quiet breathing, Ben’s light snores. They didn’t mention it in the morning, anyway. He once cut himself shaving and had to sit down on the edge of the bathtub, head between his knees for thirty minutes because the sight of blood robbed all the breath from his lungs. 

“It’s dead, right?” he asked Mike one very, very bad night. He could hear water gurgling in the pipes and every whisper of the house creaking sounded like a blood streaked door being slowly pulled open, and it was all he could do to not cry, to look white-faced and scared, maybe, but not to be sobbing. “We definitely killed it, right? Because Bev had dreams after last time too, and-!”

“Richie!” Mike said. He put his hands on Richie’s shoulders and held him there, firm and solid, like the Mike of old had been. Gone was his frantic, manic energy, back was the even, gentle farm boy. “It’s really gone. People have bad dreams after traumatic events. But they’re just dreams, and it’s okay. I get them too.”

Mostly, they didn’t talk about it. Mostly, when Richie got to the hospital and saw that Eddie was still breathing, still smiling, still eating Jell-O with a sour look and a loud complaint that red food dye was definitely a contributing factor in a lot of cancers, he felt better. 

Then, invariably, Eddie would take a call from Myra, and Richie would feel bad again, but not as bad as before.

So long as Eddie was alive, Richie could go on loving him to the ends of the earth.

***

The more Beverly’s memories came back, the more concerned she got. Beverly hadn’t really remembered much about her father. She remembered him as the man who taught her to draw, as a janitor, as a cold man, distant. She knew he beat her, but she couldn’t really recall any specifics. Sometimes, after a terrible night when Tom left her black and blue, she wondered if it was because of her father, any repressed memories she held about him, but she could never say for sure.

Now, remembering Derry, she knew it was. Tom and Alvin were one in the same, anyone could see it. It was embarrassing, and she didn’t tell any of the others, save for Ben, in disjointed whispers in the middle of the night, any details. She mentioned her divorce and things being bad in some distant, ambiguous way, and she was fairly certain that all the other Losers understood. There was a darkness in Eddie’s eyes that said he understood perfectly. 

Still, she didn’t want them to know, didn’t want them to understand. She was the only girl in the group, and she always fought to not be. She tried so hard to be one of the guys, to be tough, to be as good as any boy and as pretty as any girl and sure, maybe it was toxic, but that was what she had to be. She was strong. That was her whole thing. And yet, somehow she had ended up the damsel in distress. The battered woman. The forty year old girl who fell down stairs and walked into doors and was just so clumsy, really, I’m injuring myself all the time, don’t worry about it. 

Even at his worst, Bill would never have written a cliché like her. But she thought maybe clichés existed so often because they were based on reality. Wasn’t it true that everyone really did go on to marry their parents?

Everyone went on to marry their parents. That thought stuck like old gum, and it nagged at Beverly day in and day out. Because the longer they stayed in Derry, the more Beverly remembered. She remembered her father, she remembered Greta Keene, she remembered Sally Muehler and the Tracker Brothers Depot and catching bugs to make the boys squirm and to prove that she could. She remembered the Barrens and Up Mile Hill and the Toziers who were always so good to her and then, she remembered less pleasant things. Like Sonia Kaspbrak. 

Beverly needed to talk to Eddie about Myra. But she knew that when she did, she would have to talk about Tom, too. 

So, she put it off, partially because she didn’t want to talk about Tom, didn’t so much as want to think about him. Also, she was never alone with Eddie, and it was much easier to cite that as the reason that she never spoke to him about the real things, the hard things. 

That reason become harder to use when, one afternoon, she found herself utterly alone with Eddie.

Mike was back to working, at least part time. He couldn’t afford not to, and he wouldn’t let any of the others just pay for him. (Not that they hadn’t tried - Beverly had asked several times, and Mike had agreed to stay in a house with them, but nothing else.) Bill and Ben had separately scheduled long-distance video calls that afternoon, Bill with the director of _The Attic Room,_ and Ben with his construction company. It looked like Bev and Richie would be going in together, but then Richie offered with some indecipherable twinkle in his eye to go get ice cream from a special shop downtown and bring it back. Eddie sounded thrilled, though he tried not to, and Richie was gone like that.

Leaving Bev alone with Eddie.

“So,” Beverly said. Her mouth felt dry. _Ask him_, she told herself. _Ask him about Myra, if he knows, if she’s better_. “Ah, you’ve been approved to eat ice cream now?”

“Ish,” Eddie said. He looked sheepish, a little bit of color rising to his waxy cheeks. “Um, it’s not a great idea for me to be eating something that heavy yet but it’s not like I’m going to eat the cone and I mean, I’m literally in a hospital getting monitored full time right now so it’d be better if something went wrong now than later, right?”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine, Eds,” Beverly said. “Didn’t think you’d be such a risk taker for the sake of ice cream.”

“Well, it’s kind of a tradition,” Eddie said, again turning pink. “For Richie and me, anyway. And it might be nice to dredge up a decent memory of this town.”

“Yeah,” Bev said. “Guess Derry doesn’t have a lot going for it. I can’t imagine what they put in the travel brochures.”

“‘Perfect playground for the budding mortician’?” Eddie said, and Beverly snorted.

“Something like that.”

Beverly rested her hand on the bed, palm up for Eddie to grab hold of in case he wanted to. The two of them hadn’t been in the closest when they were kids - they were all friends, of course, but Eddie had never been as close to her as Bill or Ben or even Richie. But they loved each other, and they had a lot in common. Maybe too much in common. 

“Eddie, I was wondering-”

“Can I ask you something-?”

They both stopped, caught each other’s gazes. Eddie laughed a tiny, nervous laugh. 

“You go first,” Bev said. She fiddled with the hospital sheets, stiff and starchy under her fingers. She kept her gaze fixed on the sheets as well, rather than look at Eddie’s face. The bandage on his cheek had come off, but there was still an angry pink and white scar where he had been stabbed. It was hard to look at.

“How are things with Tom?” 

Bev’s head snapped up, and Eddie looked immediately embarrassed. 

“I mean,” he winced. “I mean, the divorce process, how’s that… coming along?”

“It’s fine,” Beverly said automatically. “Great, I mean, everything’s fine, and it’s all just. Just fine.” 

Eddie was still staring her down after she said that, so Beverly steeled herself and continued.

“He’s not happy of course, but I blocked his number. Got a restraining order. Just precautions, of course.”

“Of course,” Eddie repeated quickly. Bev felt a spiky sort of pang in her chest as she remembered that she had often talked to Eddie as children, because she and Eddie always allowed each other to lie. 

“If you need any help, I know my lawyer is kinda pricey, but-”

“Eddie, it’s, like, so fine,” Bev laughed a tiny little laugh. Watery, like she was going to cry, but she wasn’t, she refused to cry about this in front of Eddie. Her Derry memories and her not-Derry memories were combining too quickly, too solidly. She had loved Tom, she realized to her dismay. Really loved him. “I’m- I’ve got my own line of clothes, I’m going to be _fine_, and I didn’t get much of a prenup, but- but I can handle it. Don’t you have, you know, medical bills to worry about?”

“I don’t think any of us that left Derry are really hurting for cash,” Eddie said dryly, and Bev laughed, though he hadn’t told a joke.

“What’s it like?” Eddie asked, just before the silence had really sunken in again, weighing them down as it always did. 

“What’s what like?” Bev asked. When she finally looked over at Eddie, she saw that Eddie was looking down at his blankets, not meeting her eyes.

“Getting a divorce?” Eddie asked. He still did not look up.

There was a beat of silence.

“Eds,” Beverly said. “Are you-?”

“I called my lawyer this morning,” Eddie said. His usually pale cheeks were ruddy, and he sounded like he was in pain, though Bev doubted if morphine would do anything for him. “Myra’s coming up tomorrow and I’m gonna tell her then.”

“Why?” Beverly asked. Because sure, she had planned on asking him why they were married at all, but suddenly the question of why they were getting divorced seemed much more pressing.

“I-” Eddie paused, looked up at her, miserable. “Myra’s great. She’s - we go to concerts and hang out and I know she’s not- she’s no supermodel, but who cares, you know? She’s my _friend_. I like her so much because we’re friends. She just. She worries. She worries-”

“-a lot,” Bev said dully. “Tom worries a lot too.”

“Not like that!” Eddie insisted. He was sitting up, then, fervent, his hands twisted into claws in the bedsheets while he pleaded for Bev to understand. “She’s like my mom but not, you know? And I really, really do like her, even if she does worry. It’s more than that.”

“What is it?” Beverly asked.   
“I think.” Eddie didn’t cut himself off so much as he simply stopped. 

“Think what?” Beverly asked.

“I like Myra as a friend,” Eddie said, selecting each word with deliberate, almost over exaggerated care. “Only as a friend.”

Beverly stopped, taking that in.

“Have you ever liked a woman as more than a friend?” she asked, delicate as she could. She could feel her heart pounding in weird places, like her palms and the backs of her knees. No one had ever come out to her before, but she couldn’t think of anything else that might be happening now.

“No,” Eddie said. “Never.”

“So,” Beverly said, after a long and heavy pause. “So, do you think you’re… gay?” She tried to ask objectively, to not say it like a dirty word. Eddie, for his part, looked miserable.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I think I’m gay.”

“Eds,” Beverly said. “I mean. Holy shit. Have you ever told-?”

“No,” Eddie said. 

“I didn’t… finish,” Beverly said. 

“I haven’t ever told anyone,” Eddie said. “I hadn’t said it out loud at all. I don’t think I’d… thought it at all.”

“Jesus,” Beverly said. It was heavy, not that she needed to tell Eddie that. Heavy enough that her fingers were itching to light up a cigarette, but of course, you couldn’t really do that in a hospital room.

“Yeah,” said Eddie. 

The two of them sat in silence for so long that Beverly did reach for a carton of cigarettes, pulled them all the way out before sticking them back in her pocket.

“Guess you don’t want one,” Beverly said with a laugh.

“No,” Eddie said. 

“You’re really divorcing her, huh?” Beverly asked. 

“I think so,” Eddie said. “She’s coming out to visit me tomorrow. Because she’s worried about me. God, am I the biggest asshole in the world?”

“No!” Beverly said immediately. “Jesus Christ, Eds. It’s… kinder to let her go than to keep up a lie like this.”

“It’s not-! I didn’t mean to lie!” Eddie said.

“Fuck, I didn’t mean that,” Beverly said. “I just mean-”

“I get it!” Eddie said. “Look, I- I’m sorry. I’m not trying to snap at you. I’m just. Kinda going through a lot right now.”

“No shit,” Beverly said with a tiny laugh. “Jesus, you’re going through everything right now, huh?”

“Aren’t we all?” Eddie asked. He didn’t sound much like he was in the mood for laughing. A thought occurred to Beverly, one that rose unbidden.

“What brought this up?” Beverly asked. “I mean, what about Derry made you realize you were gay?”

Eddie looked away from her once again. 

“Thing is-” Eddie said, and the door banged open.

“Dude, there’s a fucking Starbucks where the ice cream shop used to be!” Richie said. He was holding a cup holder, Bev noticed, with three very sugary looking frappuccinos stuffed into it. “I mean, what kind of corporate sell-outs-?”

“You get me strawberry?” Eddie asked.

“Dude,” said Richie, and he handed Eddie a bright pink cup bigger than his forearm. “You assume I know what your favorite frap flavor is? That’s kind of conceited.”

Eddie took the cup in his good arm and sipped, looking deeply pleased. He smiled at Richie, and Bev traced his line of sight over to Richie. Eddie was looking at Richie with the most fond smile, eyes flicking between Richie’s lips and his own knees. 

And then Bev got it. She made a deep effort not to meet eye contact with either of them, and she got it. 

Someone had reminded Eddie of who he was, not just something.

***

Eddie kind of assumed he was done living in a state of dread after IT had died. They’d killed the bad guy, saved the day. It was supposed to be happily ever after. But that day, after talking with Bev, he remembered that he might have been brave, but brave didn’t stop him from being scared all the time.

“So, Eds, whad’ya wanna do today?” Richie asked. “Road trip? Bungee jumping? Good old fashioned rough housing? I’m sure we can rip those stitches right up so that you get to stay in your all time favorite place, the Derry Home Hospital, for most of the rest of your days.”

“Very funny,” Eddie said. “Hilarious.”

“It is a _little _ironic that you’ve spent forty years thinking you were all sick and injured and now that you know that was fake, you actually are bedbound.”

“As you’ve mentioned several times,” Eddie said. “And I’m not completely bed bound. I could totally be adventurous.”

“Ooh, adventurous? What do you count as adventurous? Watching TNT instead of CNN for the next hour?” Richie asked.

“I had a bad boy phase in college,” Eddie said with a very persnickety sort of sniff that he was sure ruined whatever point he was trying to make.

“Oh, I’m sure,” Richie said. “You put off paying a parking ticket?”

“I have tattoos!” Eddie said. “I drove a motorcycle!”

“Wait, wha-?” Richie said, his eyes going wide, his jaw stupid and slack. He was so dramatically expressive that it was a little bit breathtaking for Eddie. Everything he did was like an endless theatrical performance, over the top and loud and larger than life. Including his current delighted shock. “You have tattoos?”

“That wasn’t the point,” Eddie said. “The point is-”

“Can I see?”

“The _point-_”

“Do you have, like, a dick tattoo? I hear you have to be totally erect when they do that-”

“I’m not totally boring!” 

“So you do?!”

“Jesus Christ! I don’t have a dick tattoo!” Eddie shouted, just in time for the nurse to walk in. She smiled at him, clearly barely holding back laughter. Eddie felt his cheeks get hotter, and Richie didn’t hold back laughter at all.

“Can I see them?” Richie asked. “Or do I just have to guess? I’m kinda hoping you’ve some like, slutty, Sailor Jerry stuff. Maybe a tramp stamp. Or, oh, the classic - a heart with “Mom” written on it! But the “mom” is crossed out and “Myra” is written underneath.”

“Are you done?” Eddie asked.

“Never,” Richie said. 

“Did you actually have something in mind to do today, or did you just want to keep being an asshole?”

“Can we do something while I’m being an asshole? I like to multitask,” Richie said. And Eddie rolled his eyes, because he was supposed to, but he couldn’t help still being endeared, because it was Richie. 

“What do you wanna do?” Richie asked then, with a hint of real curiosity. He was even quiet after he asked, like he was honestly asking in search of an answer.

“I-” Eddie said, taken aback. Richie’s sudden bouts of seriousness were out of nowhere and so brief, they always caught Eddie off-guard. “I want to get out of this _fucking _room. Ideally, I wanna get out of this fucking bed.”

“I can do that,” Richie said. “Sit back - uh, lay back - and watch the master work.”

“‘The master’?” Eddie repeated, and Richie shushed him, then slipped out the door. Eddie counted his long, deep breaths, no longer rattling horribly around his shattered chest but holding steady as he waited to release them. He was only up to thirty breaths when Richie burst through the door again, this time pushing a wheelchair.

“Your chariot,” Richie said. When Eddie made a face, Richie rolled his eyes - somehow reading Eddie’s mind and already a step ahead. “I can help you up into it.”

“I- thanks,” Eddie said, grudgingly. He lifted his eyes skyward, aware from his few interactions with nurses wheeling him into the bathroom that this was going to be humiliating. 

Richie bent over to scoop Eddie up, bridal style, and Eddie wrapped his arms around Richie’s neck. Richie lifted him from the bed and Eddie did his best to tense what muscles he could to make himself lighter. 

The thing was that all of Eddie’s core muscles were shredded, and his legs were still mobile, sort of. They got worse when he came in. He didn’t understand all the medical terminology the doctors gave him, but the gist of it was that everything below his waist was fritzy as a radio in a thunderstorm. Some days he felt like he could probably walk with nothing but a walking stick, and then, days like today, he was lucky to be able to lift his legs a little so that it was easier for Richie to position him in the chair. 

Far from ideal, but Eddie supposed it was a fairly small price to pay to be alive. Still, Richie lifting him kept Eddie torn. On the one hand, he hated to feel so prone and vulnerable as this made him, held in the air by nothing but Richie’s arms, feeling small and embarrassed and very, very weak. On the other hand, being pressed to Richie’s chest, feeling nothing in the world but Richie’s arms wrapped around him - 

But Eddie tried not to let his thoughts drift down that path, and he was deposited in the chair easily enough.

“Alrighty, Eds, prison break,” Richie said. “Try to act natural.”

“You know, I’m pretty sure the most conspicuous thing about us is you, dickwad,” Eddie said, and Richie faked a look of affront.

“Edward Kaspbrak, is that any way to talk to the kind and sanctimonious nurses just trying to get you the fresh air and sunshine you so desperately need to heal?” Richie asked. Eddie was scrambling for a new insult or complaint when he processed the words.

“Fresh air and sunshine?” he asked. Richie was behind him then, pushing Eddie forward (and God, but it was still disorienting, moving without his own effort, gliding without even pressing his foot down on the gas pedal of a car) so Eddie couldn’t see his expression, but he was sure he could imagine the slightly mischievous, slightly proud smile Richie would have. 

“Can’t spoil all the surprises,” Richie told him, and wheeled him past a nurses’ station where no one looked twice at Eddie, then into an elevator heading up. 

“What, is there an observation deck here? At the hospital built for a town of thirty-k?” Eddie asked. The elevator dinged up and up, and Richie might have made a face, but Eddie couldn’t see it.

“No, but interestingly, hospitals for towns of this size population do have pretty easy ways to get around rules and, you know, fire codes,” Richie said. The elevator dinged again, but no numbers glowed on the wall. The doors squeaked open to the sky in front of them. 

Richie rolled Eddie out onto gravel that seemed like it would shake his teeth loose as the wheelchair bumped over it. Eddie didn’t care. Three and four and even the odd five-story building stretched out all around them and beneath them, and everywhere else they were surrounded by sky. One ancient sign read “RESTRICTED Rooftop Access”

Eddie felt the air catch in his throat. It was a bright, sunny midday, perfect June weather, and as Derry wasn’t known for its skyscrapers, all there was, all around them, was miles and miles of perfect, bright blue sky.

Eddie didn’t say anything, just basked in the sunny stillness as Richie rolled him over loose, crunching gravel. It must have been tightly packed for the old wheelchair to go over it at all, but it still felt like riding over pothole ridden roads outside of Scranton Pennsylvania to Eddie. Not that he minded. Not that anything could mar the brilliant sunshine of the day, the warm, firm presence of Richie behind him. Eddie could think of nothing to say that wouldn’t shatter the fragile, beautiful moment, so he stayed silent.

“Crazy, huh?” Richie said after a minute. They were nearer the edge, but not _near _it, not so close that Eddie’s wheelchair could even threaten to go near it. “This shitty town looks kind of pretty, you know, from a distance.”

“Ferris Bueller,” Eddie murmured, and then winced, sure he would have to spend an hour explaining how he got to that, but he felt Richie nod behind him.

“In reverse,” he said. “We finally stepped back, but we always knew this place was shit.”

“Looks a lot better without the killer clown,” Eddie said, and Richie laughed one, brittle laugh.

“Thank you,” Eddie said, shocking himself with the sudden sincerity. “This is- I mean, it’s great, up here.”

“Yeah,” Richie sniffed. “Thought of bringing you up here in a thunder storm, but, you know, I figure with your luck, the wheelchair would just turn into a lightning rod and fry you up.”

Eddie wished he could always be as brave as he had been back in the sewers. Wished he was brave enough to force Richie to say something serious back, for once, or to keep being sincere himself. Wished he could smile all knowingly and say “Yeah, I love you too, jackass,” because of course, even when Richie wasn’t being serious, Eddie knew what he meant. 

Instead, he said: “Yeah, fuck you too, bro,” and hoped that Richie knew what it meant.

And the two of them stayed outside and watched the sky.

***

Richie was stuck in the waiting room again. 

He had managed to chill out a very little. He didn’t show up until half an hour before visiting hours began and Bev was nice enough to the nurses that they didn’t glare at him anymore. The longer Eddie stayed at the hospital, the less acquainted Richie got with the waiting room.

Except for this morning, when Myra came back, and Eddie (via the endless telephone game with nurses and orderlies) conveyed to them that he wanted a little while alone with his wife. Not totally unexpected, Richie told himself, but then a little while stretched longer and longer, from minutes into sticky hours.

By noon, Bill and Bev had shown up, and no one had come out of Eddie’s room, and Richie was antsy. (To put it mildly.) He paced up and down the waiting room, occasionally glaring at whosoever sat behind the counter, even knowing that they couldn’t do anything about it. 

Eddie never spent this much time alone with Myra - not since the first time she came in to see him. And Richie could not fathom what was taking so long this time. He doubted if Eddie, still regrowing his midsection, was entirely ready for “get well soon” sex.

Richie was even further confused when, three hours and twenty-two minutes after arriving in the waiting room, Myra ran out. She didn’t quite run, he realized, she was just walking very, very quickly, hands balled into fists at her side and tears streaming down her face. Richie’s stomach gave an almighty lurch because if Myra was upset after seeing Eddie -

“Hey!” Richie yelled as he stood. “Hey, wait!”

Richie jogged after her, trying to hold his sudden anxiety in a firm lump in his throat. She would tell them, wouldn’t she, if something was wrong with Eddie? He was doing fine, wasn’t he? There was no way he was _dead_, he was getting better, he was going to be released soon, wasn’t he?

“Myra!” Richie shouted. Disturbing the peace of the waiting room, fucking again. He threw the door open after her and caught her on the shoulder just outside the door. He pulled at her shoulder and turned her around. 

Myra’s face was blotchy and red and tear-stained and for a moment, Richie felt the heavy dread begin to sink into his chest again, iron bands locking him down. _No_.

“Let me go!” Myra cried, and wrenched her arm from him. She wasn’t stronger than him, but Richie was so stricken, so confused, that he couldn’t keep his grip.

“Myra, what happened?!” Richie cried, but she ran from him. He watched as she slammed the rental car door and drove away, and he felt his heart thudding irregularly somewhere down by his stomach. 

Eddie couldn’t be…?

Richie made himself walk back to the hospital. Running would be admitting something was wrong, and nothing was wrong. Nothing could be wrong.

But, if nothing was wrong, why had Myra run away like that?

Richie gave up on staying calm and tore back into the waiting room. One of the nurses he definitely recognized but couldn’t for the life of him recall the name of raised her eyebrows, looking only a little derisive of him.

“Mr. Tozier?” she asked. Richie nodded, feeling horribly cold and clammy.

“You can come back, if you want,” she said, which didn’t strike Richie as incredibly professional. And then, he realized, no, if he could go back and see Eddie, he must be alive. Why would the nurse just bring him back to see a corpse? Even if they didn’t like him much, surely that sort of thing was all kinds of illegal.

Richie shot the Losers a helpless look, as though one of them could explain it, and then, funny enough, he noticed that Bev was looking down, unable or unwilling to meet his eyes. He wanted to say something to her, but the nurse looked expectant, and if Eddie was hurt, or if Eddie was just waiting for him-

Richie followed her, though she needn’t have led him. He knew the way well enough. 

Eddie looked paler than usual when Richie entered the room, but he was still sitting up, still dressed, and still looking uninjured. Or, not further injured, anyway. He didn’t look happy, certainly, but he didn’t look like he’d been told he had a month to live.

Richie was, ultimately, confused.

“Hi,” he said, and Eddie looked up. He gave Richie a worn smile, half-hearted, but full of intent.

“Hey, Rich,” he said. “How’s it, uh, going.”

“Good,” Richie said. “So. Your wife just ran out crying?”

Eddie flinched, and Richie felt instantly guilty. He wasn’t very good at tactfulness, never had been. He had a penchant for blurting out whatever he thought before thinking about why. 

“Did she look… bad?” Eddie asked. He looked as though he dreaded the answer, and suddenly Richie dreaded giving it to him.

“Um,” Richie said. “Well, you know, she was crying, so-”

“Christ,” Eddie said, his eyes sliding shut. “I guess I… should’ve seen that coming.”

Richie slid onto the bed next to Eddie, his face drawn in anxiety - which was bullshit, because being an anxious weirdo about Eddie’s health was _Eddie’s _job, along with his wife’s, and his mom’s and Richie didn’t _want _to worry about Eddie like this, didn’t want to treat him like he was fragile. The problem was, he had seen Eddie die. Maybe he could sympathize with Sonia after all of this. She’d had to watch Eddie get so sick after watching her husband die, and Richie thought he could better understand why that would do batshit insane things to a person’s head, after all that he had seen and done. Not that sympathizing with Sonia didn’t cause revulsion to curl in his stomach, making him feel physically ill when he thought about it for too long.

“Are you o- what happened?” Richie asked. To his surprise, Eddie laughed. It wasn’t a particularly happy laugh.

“Um,” he said. “She came to surprise me. With flowers. And I served her divorce papers.”

And _that _was not what Richie had expected to hear.

“You what?” he asked. He had misheard, he was sure.

Eddie turned his gaze on Richie with a fixed stare of annoyance.

“I told her I’m getting a divorce,” he said, slowly, like he was dumbing something down for a toddler, which was fair, because Richie, in that moment, could use a bit of dumbing down.

“With her,” Eddie continued. Richie blinked at him.

“She is upset because I broke up with her?” Eddie said.

Richie still said nothing.

“I no longer wish to be married to Myra and she is unhappy with that?!” Eddie said. “Are you still in there?!” He reached out to touch Richie and Richie waved his hand away with a hiss.

“Stop it, stop it, I heard you the first time!” he said. 

“Right, well, then, uh, good!” Eddie said. He looked flushed and agitated and for the life of him, Richie couldn’t make any sense of this.

“So,” Richie said, “You’re getting a divorce.”

“I am,” Eddie agreed. “I realized when I came back here that I’d forgotten so much about who I was, and I spent my whole life acting like a little boy who just lets other people tell him who he is, and you know, I realized that I don’t want to be like that anymore, that I don’t have to be like- are you fucking kidding me?”

Richie snapped his jaw closed. He realized he had been yawning, not because he was bored, just something he couldn’t control. And with no other way to play it off, he cracked a grin, all the while feeling guilty and a little bit slimy.

“Figure forty is old enough to move out of your mom’s basement?” he asked. And Eddie’s face fell. _God fucking dammit_.

“Thanks for the fucking input, asshole,” Eddie said.

“So, Myra’s upset because you’re getting a divorce,” Richie said. He was trying to be serious, and not default into humor purely because he was panicking. “What, were you ever in love with her? Or did you just date her because… you know…”

“Because she reminded me of my mom?”

“Because she reminded you of your mom, yeah.”

“I don’t know!” Eddie said. He was agitated, but he no longer looked particularly agitated with Richie, which Richie supposed was a plus. “I mean. I like her. We hang out. Hung out. She likes, uh, music. I also like, uh, music.”

“Yeah, Eds, I think most people like music,” Richie said. “So. Jesus, you’re getting a divorce. That’s… big. Do you want a divorce party? I hear all the hip millenials are throwing divorce parties.”

“I don’t - I do not want a divorce party,” Eddie said. “I just want to move past it, you know? Move on. Maybe start seeing someone I actually like.” Eddie stared at Richie when he said it, and Richie thought, for just a moment, that there was something in that gaze, some spark of a feeling for _Richie_\- 

-but then the moment passed.

“Okay, Grandpa, so do you know how to work Tinder? I will warn you, the selection outside of Derry is gonna be better, because Ben’s the hottest ticket in town and he’s already taken,” Richie said. And, Jesus Christ, was his intent here really to help Eddie hook up with a new girl? Possibly. It was less painful, somehow, than knowing Eddie was single and there was still no change. At least when he was with Myra, there was someone to cast the blame on.

Even still, the idea of doing this hurt more than he cared to admit.

“I think I’m good,” Eddie said, wrinkling his nose up. “I don’t really know if I want to meet… girls… right now.”

That sounded mildly out of line with his earlier professed intention to start seeing someone he actually liked, but Richie supposed that he just wasn’t ready to start looking at other people yet. That had to be it. He refused to let himself get his hopes up for anything else. 

And Richie realized, while Eddie stared at him, face scrunched up like he was trying to do difficult math, that he had no idea how to do this. There was some gap between him and Eddie that didn’t exist between him and any other Loser. They didn’t know how to talk to each other seriously, didn’t know how to stop joking. Everyone had been there when Richie had… lost it, he guessed. Dropped the walls he was constantly holding up around himself. He wanted to talk to Eddie, but he had no idea how to even start. From the look he was getting, he suspected Eddie felt the same.

“You wanna… talk about it?” Richie asked. The words sounded awkward and strained as soon as his formed them, and he winced after he spoke. Eddie shrugged, then made a face, probably because he was pulling at fresh wounds. 

“I’m good,” he said, again, and took a deep, bracing breath.

“Yeah, good like a cockroach,” Richie said, and punched him (very, very lightly) in the shoulder, just enough to make Eddie scrunch up his nose, not enough to hurt him. “You’re unkillable, right? Nothing gets you down.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, eyes fixed on Richie. “Guess so.”

***

Ben was the only one in the hospital room with Richie and Eddie when they got the news. 

(It was notable that Ben never thought it was weird that Richie and Eddie were always RichieandEddie. Ben could see the way Richie looked at Eddie, sure, but it was more than that. The two of them always meshed, were always a package deal, for as long as he had known them. If he’d gone into the hospital room and found Eddie alone, he would have been concerned, though he never had this thought manifest in so many words.)

“Congratulations, Mr. Kaspbrak,” the doctor said, hooking a clipboard back to Eddie’s hospital bed. “As of tomorrow, you’re free to go.”

“Oh,” said Eddie. “Just- just like that?”

The thing was, it should have been good news, as far as Ben could see. He loved his friends, loved his memories of middle school, and he didn’t want to lose a single moment of his fellow Losers. But it wasn’t as though he wanted to stay in _Derry_, much less stay in Derry Home Hospital.

So, Ben couldn’t quite rationalize why Eddie looked a little bit terrified and a little bit heartbroken at the same time. Even if he could understand why Richie looked like that.

Where, he wondered, would any of the Losers go once there was nothing holding them to Derry? Each their separate ways? (Or, maybe not all of them. Bev, he thought, probably wouldn’t want to go back to her home.)

“Just like that,” she said. “Do you need any help making travel preparations? A place to stay?”

“Um,” Eddie said. His eyes flickered over to the side for a fraction of a moment, then focused on the doctor again. “No, I’ll - I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll have your discharge papers brought to you,” she said, and then she was gone.

Richie, for his part, looked like someone had died. 

“So, Eds,” Ben said. Make the peace, make it normal, it was always his job to be the buffer, to keep happy. “You headed back to New York?”

“I guess so,” Eddie said. “I can let them know I’m probably good to go back to work. And it shouldn’t be too hard to find a new place. Might be a little tight until things go through…” he said. Richie perked up.

“If you want to wait a little while, you know, before going back to work, I’ve got a place,” Richie said. “Loads of extra room. Plus it might be good, you know, not going right back into your crappy little nine to five.”

“I’ll be fine,” said Eddie, who Ben realized, not for the first time, was an idiot. “I mean, I _have _the money, I just want to be frugal until everything goes through.”

“Yeah, but I mean, divorce can be messy, and depending on her lawyers, you could lose a lot. Best to be, you know, extra frugal,” Richie said.

“No, I’m not worried, I got a prenup,” Eddie said. And to think, there wasn’t even a conveniently placed wall for Ben to bang his head into. Over and over and over again. Eddie caught his eye, and Ben jerked his head over at Richie, looking like a lost puppy in the rain. 

“But, um, if you’re free? It’s not really safe for me to be on this high of a dosage of pain medication while I live alone, so I probably should find someone to stay with me-”

“I could stay in New York! My agent says I’m not doing enough shows there!” Richie cried. And Eddie grinned, relieved, and Richie lit up like Eddie had handed him his own personal sun. Like he was Richie’s own, personal sun.

_Idiots_.

***

They only had a moment alone, and it wasn’t enough.

The losers were packing up Eddie’s stuff, and he still had to find a short term place to stay, still had to contact management, still had to get plane tickets.

But he only had a few minutes, and Eddie was feeling brave and completely in the mood to make the next few months awkward as hell.

If he hadn’t imagined what Ben was showing him, that look on Richie’s face, Richie’s voice from the Turtle…

Well, Eddie was probably insane, he thought. Almost definitely. He had imagined a magic turtle that carried him to safety and he had imagined Richie staring at him with desperate pleading and he had imagined defeating an evil sewer clown and imagined being brave and not having asthma and everything was all in his head either way he sliced it, _but_.

“Rich?” 

“Yeah?” 

Richie did turn around a little faster, didn’t he? He did look a little more intense. And maybe, just how Eddie didn’t get asthma attacks when he ran and never realized, maybe he and Richie had never touched like the other boys. Maybe he just. Never realized.

But for all that imagined bravery, Eddie still chickened out at the last second.

“Help me out of bed?” he asked. 

His brain was at war with itself as Richie walked over, walking quickly, though somehow his steps seemed agonizingly slow. Half of him was still a coward, still wanted to be meek and mild and to act the same as he always had. To endure the next few months living with Richie as _friends_.

The other half of him wanted to say something. Anything.

Instead of coming to any sort of compromise, Eddie overcorrected.

As Richie leaned in and settled his hands on Eddie’s shoulders, Eddie lurched forward. _Do it now!_

He didn’t kiss Richie, exactly. His mouth crashed into Richie’s, knocking their heads together with such force that Richie’s glasses slid down his nose. Eddie braced himself with two locked arms against the hospital bed, holding him in place. He kept his eyes scrunched up, and tried to will the moment into a kiss. He let his lips soften, tried to curve around Richie’s mouth. 

For a horrible, agonizing second, Richie was stone still, like he was a plastic statue, like he was still caught in the deadlights. All that stupid, foolhardy bravery seemed to crash around Eddie’s ears with the overwhelming knowledge that he had fucked up.

And then, Richie fell forward. Eddie was pushed back onto the pillow and his arms went limp, and Richie’s mouth locked onto his mouth, a kiss that was moving and alive and warm and _Richie_.

When Richie pulled back after quite a while, his eyes were enormous behind his glasses.

“Wow,” Richie said. “Um-” he blinked a few times, then shook his head as though trying to clear water from his ears. “Heh. Uh, I guess good kissing runs in the family. You know, your mom-”

“Beep beep, asshole!”

***

“Okay, Eds,” Beverly said. “We’ve packed up all your stuff, except for the outfit that was covered in leper vomit, which we burned as you asked, and something for you to wear back home tomorrow.”

“Who picked out what I’m wearing home tomorrow?” Eddie asked, looking mildly alarmed.

“Me,” Bill said. “Just, you know, t-shirt, hoodie, jeans. Comfy clothes to wear on a plane.”

“Oh, thank God,” Eddie said, and glared at Richie.

“What? What the fuck did I do?” Richie asked, affronted.

“I just don’t trust you not to have picked, like, a Thundercats crop top and cycle shorts,” Eddie said.

“Well first, I don’t know what the fuck cycle shorts are, but if that’s what you thought you were wearing as a kid, I have news: they’re called booty shorts,” Richie said. “Second, is that a real, actual outfit that you packed?”

“_No_.”

Bill snorted. They were all crowded around Eddie’s bed, again, even though the room was clearly over capacity. Ben and Bev had come out to say an early goodbye that night, having found a great deal on plane tickets to Paris, apparently. Bill hadn’t congratulated them, not out loud, but he supposed they knew anyway.

It was almost solemn for a second, when Beverly fell onto the bed and threw her arms around Eddie’s neck.

“Gonna miss you, Eds,” she said. “We’re all hanging out again soon, right? Apparently Ben’s place is enormous, and I’m not done catching up. You’re all coming out for his birthday?”

“I promise, I won’t forget,” Eddie said, then winced. “Well, not again, anyway.”

Bev let out a watery chuckle. Her eyes were damp, but she looked happy. So happy, it felt like there was a lightness in Bill’s chest. He’d forgotten about the possibility of happy endings, and being surrounded by so many felt indescribably good to him.

There weren’t enough terms to describe happiness, he thought. There were a million synonyms for sad, but he had no word to describe how he felt in that moment, full and warm and tender and content. Still, he was the writer. Maybe he’d find something to describe it in the next book.

“I think it’ll be the first time any of you remember my birthday, actually,” Ben said. “But thanks.”

“Not true,” Richie said. “Mike made you a cake when you turned fourteen and made the rest of us feel bad.”

Ben just laughed his usual, good natured laugh, and Bill thought to himself that it was okay, everyone was gonna be okay. There was no word for that either, for a future where everything would be okay.

“We can visit you guys in New York next,” Mike said. “Bill and I are gonna be in LA, but he tells me he flies out all the time. We can come make sure you haven’t killed each other.”

Richie and Eddie looked at each other and grinned, a conspiratorial look between the two of them. Bill glanced down at the hospital bed and saw that Eddie’s right arm was under the blanket, his hand a lump under powder blue sheets. Notably, Richie’s left hand was _also _under Eddie’s blanket, and the misshapen bulge under the covers looked a bit more like two hands intertwined than one. 

Somehow, the most surprising thing about it was that Bill wasn’t all that surprised.

There was also no word to describe the sensation of watching your friends figure it all out, figure out how to be happy, except perhaps _finally_.

***

They should probably talk, Richie thought. Like, they really, really needed to talk. After all, he and Eddie had _kissed_, and while Richie sure as shit wasn’t complaining, it probably warranted talking about.

Instead, as was his custom, Richie stuck his foot directly in his mouth.

“Need help putting these on, hot stuff?” he asked, holding up the remarkably unsexy outfit Bill had packed for him. Eddie blinked at Richie, unimpressed, and Richie could feel himself wilting on the inside.

“So, about yesterday,” Eddie said, and Richie’s head shot up. Eddie was fiddling with his sheets, looking embarrassed, looking awkward as hell, like they were both still 13. “Did I make it weird? I mean, do you want to… whatever?”

“Whatever?” Richie repeated dubiously. “Do I want to what? Because if you want me to take, like, your almost ex-wife’s identity before we kill her, I’m not down for that-”

“Do you want to- to date? I guess?” Eddie said. “I’ve never really done this before!”

“Clearly you have,” Richie said. “And clearly I haven’t.”

“I’m not proposing to you, asshole,” Eddie said. “Will you just- I’ve never done this with a guy. Never with someone I cared about. So. Do you want to… date? I guess?”

Richie gave Eddie an obnoxiously fond smile.

“I want nothing more than to date you, I guess,” he said. But he might have been too late. Eddie already looked annoyed, and a little hurt, folded in on himself in the tiny little hospital bed. 

“If you’re just doing this out of pity, or so it won’t be weird-!” Eddie began, and Richie was physically incapable of not rolling his eyes.

“What?!” Eddie asked.

“Nothing, I just - c’mon. I wanna show you something before we leave town, okay?”

Eddie gave him a dubious look, which was, Richie supposed fair, given that it was Derry and what good could Derry possibly have to offer them? But he wasn’t any good at this, at talking about his feelings and confessing his love. He knew how to cheer people up, sort of. He knew that he _did _love people, even if everyone who’d ever yelled at him made it abundantly clear that he didn’t show it. But how to demonstrate it? How did people say “I love you” without laughing at themselves so hard they cried? How did you tell someone you wanted to be with them forever without making yourself the biggest jackass on the planet?

Richie didn’t have the answer to any of these questions, but he had a vague hope that maybe showing Eddie would do something to prove that he wanted this. That he… loved him. No matter how hard the words were to get out.

The car ride was slow, in spite of Richie’s car that was so expensive primarily because of its ability to go fast. Eddie hadn’t been out of the hospital in over a month, and he had his nose pressed to the glass, staring out at the sunlit world. Richie, in a show of tremendous self-restraint, didn’t even make fun of him for it.

“You wanna stop and get, you know, real people food?” Richie asked.

“What’s the point? They took out the ice cream shop and I don’t think McDonalds is that big of an improvement to hospital food. Besides, do you have any idea the abysmally low health guidelines in public restaurants in the state of Maine? It’s absolutely unbelievable-”

“Right, so we’ll just head out,” Richie said, and he rolled his eyes, and his heart hung heavy and swollen in his chest. 

Eddie continued to look dubious when they pulled over at the bridge, frowning at Richie before Richie could even open the door.

“The bridge where Ben almost got murdered?” he asked.

“Okay, can you remember nothing else about the kissing bridge?” Richie asked. Eddie made a face - there were still some memories of childhood they had to strain for, after all, who remembered everything about being a kid. Then he shrugged.

“Couples made out here and carved mean shit on the bridge,” he said.

“And their names,” Richie sighed. “They also wrote their names or initials. Ya know, in little hearts?”

“Right,” Eddie said. “Where are we going with this?”

“Just open the door,” Richie said.

“Bossy,” Eddie muttered, but he opened the door and Richie helped him out and into his wheelchair. Eddie grumbled the whole time about how he couldn’t believe Richie couldn’t just show him from the car so they didn’t have to mess with the chair, but Richie had a nagging suspicion that Eddie didn’t actually mind that much.

Richie felt a swell of stage fright in his stomach as he pushed the wheelchair up to the rail of the bridge, not unlike the feeling he got before a big show began. But he was being stupid. Eddie had kissed him. 

(And maybe Eddie would think this was embarrassing and unnecessary but no, Richie wasn’t going to think in those kinds of negatives.)

“What am I looking for?” Eddie asked.

“Um,” said Richie, and he scanned the bridge to find the mark again. Luckily, he’d worked the letters in fresh, so it stood out like new. “Over here!” 

He wheeled Eddie over so quickly that he ran over a few larger rocks, making Eddie hiss in pain, but he could apologize later. He pushed Eddie right up to the R + E and pointed to it, and in spite of everything, he realized he was smiling, emotional tears that he refused to let fall pricking at the corners of his eyes.

“I carved it,” he said. “When we were… when we were kids.”

Eddie, who had been leaning over, was suddenly very still. His lips formed the shape of the letters, and Richie waited.

“How young?” he asked.

“Um,” said Richie again. He seemed to shrink in on himself. “Thirteen, maybe?”

Eddie’s voice was thick when he spoke again.

“Starting to think you weren’t coming back for your jacket after all.”

“No shit, dumbass,” Richie said, and the pesky tears he’d been fighting off spilled over. He swiped at his face, but too late. “Of course I- of course.”

“Get down here,” Eddie said.

“What?”

“Get down here!” Eddie said again. Richie leaned down, bringing his face close to Eddie’s, and then, without warning, Eddie’s mouth pressed into his again. 

“Mmph!” said Richie, and Eddie laughed a tiny little laugh into Richie’s mouth, the sensation like inhaling pure light.

“Think I love you, Trashmouth,” he said. Richie’s heart felt so huge, so unbearably large in his chest that he hardly had room to breathe.

“I guess you know I l-love you, Eds,” he said.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, one hand curled around Richie’s neck, holding him there, holding Richie to him. “Yeah, I do.”

***

It wasn’t perfect, of course. There was still a divorce to deal with, and careers to manage. There was a lot of coming out to deal with, and fights about trivial details, dishes left in the sink, hair caught in the drain.

But when they went to Ben’s birthday dinner, they went holding hands. When they flew out to LA for another premiere of Bill’s, it was with thin golden bands on their fingers. Eddie’s happy ending included getting divorced, getting physical therapy, getting used to the paparazzi that followed his new husband around, and remembering a lot of childhood trauma. It wasn’t the life he expected to be living. It wasn’t the life his mother had ever wanted him to live, that was for-fucking-sure. But he lived well enough. And he was so, so happy, ever after.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay wow sorry for the long wait!!! I was gonna add Conflict (tm) in the final chapter but then I decided that was dumb and they just needed their ends sewed up and a nice happy ever after, like they deserve. 
> 
> I guess that's all I've got! I'm gonna work on my other reddie fic, maybe a christmas thing? so if you guys like my writing, I hope you stick around! 
> 
> thanks so much for following the story to its end!

**Author's Note:**

> look. I don't tell you how to live your life. I'm just saying that yes, they leave Eddie in the sewers, BUT you can't prove to me that this /didn't/ happen.


End file.
